From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 11:36:19 EST
Phil Blair wrote as follows.
quote
2. The Jesuits and other missionaries of the Age of Exploration worked
and published intensively in then-exotic languages on four continents. There
are scholars and groups of scholars now attempting to look systematically at
that body of work. I suspect that there is no stange character that could
turn up in a Maya text from that period that wouldn't also turn up in texts
about South American, Asian, or African languages, and when we do deal with
these characters it would be best to do it in a systematic and comprehensive
way. They will all reflect a common origin in the missionary training
institutions of Europe.
end quote
That research sounds fascinating. Do you have any details of who is doing
the research please? I am not a linguist yet do have a great interest in
the typographical aspects of the way special characters were printed by the
early printers. I also have an interest in history so such a project would
be doubly interesting for me.
I suggest that a good idea would be if those of us who are interested could
research the typography and printing aspects and that a Private Use Area
encoding could be made of the special characters. Then various craft
fontmakers might all use the same encoding and start to produce fonts which
contain the characters. For example, as a first suggestion, if U+E400 and
upwards were used for that purpose, would that be a suitable choice for the
various font makers who might like to consider adding such characters into
their existing fonts? The long term goal would be to get the characters
promoted into regular Unicode, yet using the Private Use Area would allow
documents to be encoded rather sooner than if one needs to wait for encoding
into regular Unicode and any such documents encoded could be converted by an
automated process at a later date. Indeed, using the Private Use Area in
this manner and having font availability might help the research. My
suggestion of U+E400 is as a basis for discussion: does anyone happen to
know if the researchers have already started a Private Use Area encoding
please as that possibility needs to be checked before starting a new
encoding?
Does anyone happen to know if any of the metal fonts, or matrices, of such
characters survive from the sixteenth century please? From the general
history of printing there does seem to be a great lack of surviving early
printing type, which has always seemed strange to me, as well as
unfortunate.
William Overington
28 March 2003
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