Re: Punctuation symbols for partial cuneiform characters

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 03:53:28 EDT

  • Next message: Kent Karlsson: "RE: Punctuation symbols for partial cuneiform characters"

    From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
    > TUS 4.0, p. 413:
    >
    > "Character images shown in the code charts are not prescriptive.
    > In actual fonts, considerable variations are to be expected."
    >
    > TUS 4.0, p. 414:
    >
    > "Designers of high-quality fonts will do their own research into the
    > preferred glyphic appearance of Unicode characters. ...
    >
    > "Many characters have been unified and have different appearances
    > in different language contexts. ..."
    >
    > The latter note can easily be extrapolated to recognizing that the
    > use of left/right floor/ceiling as bracket pairs in mathematics and
    the
    > use of left/right ceiling as (corner) bracket pairs in medieval
    > textual apparatus represent sufficiently different contexts that
    > it is not unreasonable to expect "designers of high-quality fonts"
    > to depict them with appropriately distinct appearances.

    I also concur to support the fact that the CEILING brackets, even if
    they
    were initially introduced to support mathematical symbols, can be used
    as regular punctuation, for the same reasons that square brackets are
    defined as punctuations and also used as mathematical symbols.

    For the case of medieval texts, the change of appearance of these
    symbols (with shorter legs), just needs to be considered as a font
    variant, which would be in sync with the change of appearance of
    glyphs for letters in the mediaval text.

    If someone reproduces the mediaval text with (say) a "Arial Unicode"
    font, that will display long legs for ceiling brackets, it won't be
    wrong
    given that the narrow sans-serif style was actually never used for
    letters in medieval text.

    If one wants to have exact forms for these corner punctuation, one
    would need to select another font for the text, that would also
    include the short-leg glyphs for corner punctuations, simply encoded
    with the existing mathematical symbols.

    This will work correctly given the existing mirroring and Bidi
    properties
    of these CEILING mathematical symbols, that behave exactly like the
    square brackets, independantly of their current general category
    as symbols or punctuations...

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