From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Mar 18 2003 - 11:09:34 EST
At 02:25 AM 3/18/2003, Pim Blokland wrote:
>On the other hand, it has been done! There are occasions on which
>new codepoints were created for characters that were basically glyph
>variants. The greek letter koppa springs to mind: there are two
>glyph variants for this letter, and when it turned out font
>designers weren't sure how it should look, new codepoints were
>introduced for the "archaic" koppa, in order to show both variants
>and avoid confusion.
The two 'glyph variants' of the archaic koppa have very different semantic
values: one is used as a letter and one is used in a numeric context. I
think this supports the view that they should, in fact, be considered as
separate characters, since both forms may be used in a document and it may
be necessary, even in plain text, to distinguish them.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Anyone who has both children and house pets has
surely noticed that the children exposed to language
will develop language, in turn, whereas the house
pets will not. - Stephen Pinker
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