From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 04:00:08 EDT
At 10:00 AM 6/9/03 +0300, jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com wrote:
> > It also appears along with other symbols used in the OED at
> > http://dictionary.oed.com/public/help/Advanced/symbols.htm#mod1letter.
> > (Again, not all these symbols are currently part of Unicode.)
>
>To state the obvious (and "random email does not official character
>proposals make")
>Unicode having all the characters the OED needs would be a rather obvious
>target...
The same can be said for lists of characters from other venerable institutions.
However, the problem is that we need to be able to answer several questions
for each such character, most of which cannot be answered from having
(just) a listing.
- what is the name of the symbol [some lists give ad-hoc names]
- what is the symbol used for [most lists are silent on this question]
- what is the symbol not used for [a subtle but importantly different question]
- where is the symbol used
[the oed list implies use in the oed, other lists capture external usage]
- what is the permissible / expected range of glyphic variation
[often answered by fonts and/or examples]
- is there a historic development that helps in the encoding decision
etc.
I'm quite happy to act as a focal point for creating an actual proposal out
of the information available to members of this list. If one or more of you
would like to
look over the list in the OED and perhaps the list in the US Govt. Printing
Office Style Manual (ch 10) or the list that's reputedly on p. 190 of the
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and track down information on one or
more characters, that would be great. I'd be happy to collect the results
and organize them for review.
On the question of the letterforms based on p, I have gotten excellent
feedback, and can report that I can now make a formal proposal for the
'per' sign with full confidence in the information available.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 09 2003 - 04:47:52 EDT