Re: Public Review Issues Update

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Aug 27 2004 - 14:33:39 CDT

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    From: "Rick McGowan" <rick@unicode.org>
    > The Unicode Technical Committee has posted new public review issues.
    > Details are on the following web page:
    >
    > http://www.unicode.org/review/
    >
    > Briefly the new issues are:
    >
    >
    > 40 Encoding of Latin Capital and Small Letter "At"
    >
    > LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AT and LATIN SMALL LETTER AT are used as orthographic
    > characters in the Koalib language of Sudan. Although similar in appearance
    > to COMMERCIAL AT, LATIN SMALL LETTER AT should have different character
    > properties. The main concern is the similarity in appearance of LATIN
    SMALL
    > LETTER AT to COMMERCIAL AT. There are potential implications for Internet
    > protocols that use "@".

    Until this proposal, the last times I saw a capital letter AT was as a
    symbol, with probably the same meaning as the classic commercial AT. I
    thought it was just a presentation variant.
    Well, with this proposed new character, texts may now use this capital
    letter as a symbol as well, without depending on presentation forms that may
    be present in some fonts. It would not change its property as a capital
    letter, as this choice of usage would be left to the author (after all, the
    ASCII period has many usages too...)
    The only good question is: does a font need to show a visible difference for
    the lowercase letter at and the existing commercial at symbol? Probably not,
    unless the current design of the symbol in an existing font does not fit
    well with the design style of other latin letters (but the provided
    documents snapshot are not exhibiting a unified design style for the at
    letter and the other latin letters (notably for the slanting angle of the
    lowercase at letter, or the glyphic presentation of its "embedded" letter a
    with a single eye instead of two eyes for the normal latin letter a).

    Couldn't there exist two presentation forms for lowercase letter at, like it
    is for lowercase letter a ?

    As a subsidiary question, are there languages that make a distinction
    between the one-eye and two-eyes forms of lowercase letter a (U+0061)? If
    so, how is their uppercase versions ?

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