From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat Apr 17 2004 - 16:54:46 EDT
At 09:03 -0700 2004-04-17, John Hudson wrote:
>Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>So for me, MIDDLE DOT is to COLON as MODIFIER
>>LETTER HALF TRIANGULAR COLON is to MODIFIER
>>LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON.
>
>This would make the mid-dot too high. The top
>dot of the colon usually sits toward the top of
>the x-height; the *mid*-dot should sit lower,
>optically midway up the x-height (which means
>slightly higher than the actual halfway mark).
>The top dot of a colon is typically closer to
>the height of the Greek ano teleia, which aligns
>with the x-height (and which should align with
>the cap height in all-cap settings, and with the
>small-cap height in smallcap settings).
John, I just don't believe you. I don't believe
that in all the history of Greek and Catalan
typography this careful hairsplitting has
*always* taken place; certainly in scientific
transcription the HALF TRIANGULAR COLON is just
the top dot in the TRIANGULAR COLON, and in
Americanist transcription where the dot-colons
are used instead of triangles I would say the
same applies.
António said:
>Another nail in the coffin of "use U+00B7 : MIDDLE DOT for Catalan":
>Perhaps because it is exclusively used between "L"s (a "high" letter
>in both cases), Catalan middot is placed exactly as Michael has it:
>The top dot of a colon (careful Catalan typewriter users do/did just
>this, erasing or masking the bottom dot of a colon).
This evidence would suggest to me that my analysis is correct.
The samples Asmus sent suggest to me that a
school of typographers made a set of bad
decisions, even if they were really famous and
got paid lots of money and their fonts are widely
shipped!
But that's just my opinion.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 17 2004 - 17:28:07 EDT