Re: U+00D0, U+01b7 -- variants or distinct chars?

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Mar 17 2003 - 19:20:09 EST

  • Next message: jameskass@att.net: "Re: U+00D0, U+01b7 -- variants or distinct chars?"

    Peter,

    > U+00D0: The glyph that appears in the code charts for U+00D0 is shown in
    > LtnCapEth_DStrk.gif. Now, the African Reference Alphabet document that was
    > produced at a conference in Niamey in 1978 proposeda small letter that
    > looks like U+00F0 LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH, but the capital counterpart is
    > like the glyph shown in LtnCapEthLrgSqLC.gif. This is quite different in
    > appearance from the representative glyph for U+00D0. Should this be
    > considered a glyph variant of U+00D0,

    In my opinion, yes. By the way, I also consider it an *ugly*
    glyph variant, unlikely to gain much traction, typographically.

    > or should it be considered a
    > distinct character?

    To do otherwise would be to introduce casing problems for eth.

    > U+01B7: The glyph that appears in the code charts is that shown in
    > LtnCapEzh_LrgLC.gif. In the Dagbani language of Ghana, they use a small
    > letter that looks like U+0292 LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH, but the capital
    > counterpart that they use is like the glyph shown in
    > LtnCapEzh_RevSigma.gif. This is quite different in appearance from the
    > representative glyph for U+01B7. Should this be considered a glyph variant
    > of U+01B7, or should it be considered a distinct character?
    >

    Again, a glyph variant, for the same reason. If you try to encode
    a different *character* each time someone experiments with creating
    capital forms for a lowercase letter that originally had no capital
    form, you just create casing problems for processing the data.

    This is no more extreme than the two common glyph variants of the
    capital eng character -- one shaped like a large eng and the
    other shaped like a capital en with a hooked tail.

    --Ken



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Mar 17 2003 - 20:02:50 EST