Re: CSUR Tonal

From: Luke-Jr (luke@dashjr.org)
Date: Mon Jul 26 2010 - 01:04:50 CDT

  • Next message: Luke-Jr: "Re: CSUR Tonal"

    On Sunday, July 25, 2010 07:48:58 pm Doug Ewell wrote:
    > There is a contiguous block of over 4,200 code points starting at U+E830
    > (after Monofon) and it seems to me that could be used for Tonal instead.

    I have since sending my original message moved my draft proposal to U+E9D0, as
    many of the blocks in between surprisingly have characters in my system fonts
    already.

    I also made up two fonts (one TrueType, sized to work with Luxi Mono; the
    other a bitmap, matching the KDE 3 "Console" font) for my own personal testing
    of these proposals.

    > > - Am I using COMBINING correctly? Is it sufficient for fonts to render
    > > units properly?
    >
    > These are not really combining marks; they appear to be nothing more
    > than ordinary Latin superscript letters. As such, I would suggest not
    > only that the "multiplication" and "division" superscripts be unified
    > with each other, but that they be unified with already-encoded Latin
    > superscript letters S, T, b, m, r, s, and t.

    Correct me if my understand is wrong, but I believe them to be combining
    because they can and should "attach" to some degree to the unit character
    preceding (in the case of division) or following (in the case of
    multiplication) the divisor/multiplier. It is for this font-encoding purpose
    that I created two sets which can attach in their specific direction.

    > (The existing multi-letter symbols you may have seen in the Unicode Standard
    > are for compatibility with legacy character sets, a requirement that does
    > not apply to Tonal.)

    Aren't superscript/subscript letters compatibility-only as well? Other than
    the possibly combining needs, I hope an exception (if needed) could be
    considered so as to not require rich text simply to type up a unit.

    > Note, however, that you should not reserve space for "future" multiplication
    > and division signs unless you think Nystrom defined some and you simply
    > haven't been able to find a reference. This is not a space for you to
    > invent your own symbols, unless you say so in the prose.
    > If Nystrom did not use them, you should not include them unless you
    > specifically state they are your own invention.

    I only have Nystrom's book as my guide on this, and it does not specify how
    exactly the higher-order multipliers and divisors are supposed to be written
    abbreviated. It is possible they were not meant to be at all, but this theory
    would create problems in present day when such numbers are more commonplace.
    How might I phrase it such that it is clear the extra space is only for a
    later discovery of Nystrom's extending of Tonal?

    Thanks for all the other comments as well,

    Luke



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