Re: Glyph change for Drachma Sign (U+20AF) (was: Re: Indian Rupee Sign (U+20B9) proposal)

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Mon Jul 19 2010 - 04:54:12 CDT

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    On 19 Jul 2010, at 10:33, Karl Pentzlin wrote:

    > Entering the discussion, I do not feel very happy on a fundamental glyph change like the one proposed. It may be true that there was no such sign in common use in Greece at any time, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If there is a small user group which uses this symbol for Drachma or anything else,

    Using it for "something else" is pretty irrelevant.

    > it will not served by such a glyph change, but will lose their confidence in Unicode stability.

    Nobody has ever used this thing to anyone's knowledge. Please read Nick Nicholas' page on this.

    > At least, there was (as documented in N3862) a formal request by ELOT (the Greek national standards body) to encode a symbol like the current representative glyph.

    I know. I wrote the proposal for them. They had no glyph. They had no examples of any glyphs. They gave me a sample glyph that was made of a Wingdings dingbat.

    > The new glyph proposed however (a sans-serif boldface Ξ” over P) is also no specific design proposed by anybody as distinctive Drachma design; I saw the same type of design occasionally for our former Deutsche Mark (then a D over M, of course).
    > If such in fact is needed (which I do not see at this moment), it should be encoded separately.

    We should certainly not encode two Drachma signs.

    > In my eyes, the best way to go with the Drachma Sign is the following:
    > 1. In the character tables, change the annotation "Β· Greece" into something like
    > "Β· Requested by ELOT in 1999 for Greece, but not commonly used"
    > 2. Live with the symbol as it is, as we live with e.g. U+2763.

    Glyphs are informative, Karl. We should use a glyph that has actually been used.

    Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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