RE: symbols for `born' and `died' + guarani sign

From: Handwerker, Reinhard (ISS Atlanta) (RHandwerker@iss.net)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 10:23:46 EST

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    For the "married" symbol use the mathematical "infinity" symbol: U+221E (no pun intended).
    Indeed, one could go a step further and introduce (?) a symbol for divorced:
    Either one of the following offers itself as a candidate:
    U+29DC INCOMPLETE INFINITY
    U+29DE INFINITY NEGATED WITH VERTICAL BAR

    - - - - -
    Reinhard G. Handwerker, Sr. i18n Engineer
    Internet Security Systems, Inc, +1 404 236 2600
    Go i18n@ISS!
    ISS: The Power To Protect

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Doug Ewell [mailto:dewell@adelphia.net]
    Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 14:27
    To: Unicode Mailing List
    Cc: Werner LEMBERG
    Subject: Re: symbols for `born' and `died' + guarani sign

    Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu dot org> wrote:

    > At least in Germany it is quite common to indicate the birth year with
    > a leading black five-pointed star and the death year with a leading
    > cross, resembling a dagger. Similarly, the year of marriage is
    > depicted as two intertwined circles. How will this be represented in
    > Unicode? Are there characters for it?

    and also:

    > I've found a glyph in Jörg Knappen's TC fonts (text companion fonts
    > for his EC font family for TeX) called `guarani sign' for the currency
    > of Paraguay. It is a capital letter G with a vertical bar through the
    > whole glyph.

    I think the "five-pointed star" used to denote a birth year is just an
    asterisk, U+002A. If you need something that really looks like a
    five-pointed star, try U+2605.

    The dagger representing a death year is U+2020. Ken Whistler had a
    pertinent comment on this particular case:

    http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m10/0447.html

    Remember that these are just symbols, so rather than requiring a new
    symbol with your particular semantics, it's OK to find something already
    encoded that "looks right" and use it (an exception to Jukka Korpela's
    otherwise-sound advice).

    I can't find the two intertwined circles or the G with vertical bar, so
    these *may* be candidates for encoding in a future version of Unicode if
    a proper proposal is written and accepted. (These e-mail discussions do
    not constitute a proposal, though they may be the foundation for one.)
    In the meantime, I'd just use "PYG" for the Paraguayan currency symbol.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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