From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 06:52:43 EDT
Doug Ewell wrote as follows.
> I'd say your best bet is to go with the circled numbers.
Yes, that seems the best way to go.
I have now implemented CIRCLED DIGIT ONE through to CIRCLED DIGIT NINE and
also CIRCLED DIGIT ZERO in the Quest text font.
An interesting aspect of applying these codes if someone is using a program
such as WordPad where one can insert each of the characters using an Alt
sequence with a decimal code point value, yet one cannot have a look through
the font to observe which characters are available, is that it might be
useful to have an easy way to remember the decimal value of the code point
of CIRCLED DIGIT ONE.
Remembering the famous rhyme for remembering the value of pi, where the
number of letters in each word is the value of the corresponding digit, with
ten letters for a zero, I wondered if a suitable phrase could be produced
for remembering the decimal value of the code point of CIRCLED DIGIT ONE.
CIRCLED DIGIT ONE is at U+2460 which is decimal 9312 and so I have managed
to think of the following.
Encircled and a no.
CIRCLED DIGIT ZERO is at U+24EA which is decimal 9450.
Encircled zero coded separately.
The rhyme for pi starts as follows.
Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force and magic spelling
When testing the font I did then try displaying the same text in various
well-known and widely used fonts and found that none of them displayed
CIRCLED DIGIT ONE and CIRCLED DIGIT TWO. Now, the PC I was using for that
test is a Windows 98 machine so maybe the fonts are not the latest versions
available.
I find that when I am looking at fonts at various sites on the web there are
very few fonts which implement the characters for Old English and Middle
English. Most stylish display fonts have the English alphabet and sometimes
a couple of handfuls of accented characters for those European languages
which have a large population speaking them.
I wonder if I could please put forward an idea that fontmakers might like to
consider please. Whilst recognizing that adding a lot of extra accented
characters for languages with other-than-large user populations to a font
may not be the way to go for most fonts, how about adding four or five so
that each font supports a language with an other-than-large user population?
One font might support one language, another font another language. In that
way the languages with other-than-large user populations might gradually
acquire a choice of display fonts in which they can be set.
There is a large collection of pdf files available in the
http://www.evertype.com webspace for the various languages of Europe, which
documents specify the characters needed for each language. For some
languages there is an overlap of characters with those for other languages,
so the extra characters needed for a font which already has accented
characters (for the languages with large populations of users) to support
such languages is small.
William Overington
5 May 2003
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