High dot/dot above punctuation?

From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 01:49:58 CDT

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    Dear Colleagues,

    In processing a document, I came across a punctuation character which
    I was not able to find in Unicode. As I find it hard to believe that
    the character has not been encoded yet, I must think my search was
    incomplete, and I'd be hoping that you can point me to the correct
    character to use.

    Generally, for the decimal point . (U+002E FULLSTOP) and , (U+002C
    COMMA) is used in the SI world. However, earlier conventions could use
    different notation, such as the common British raised dot which
    centers with the lining digits (i.e. that would be U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT).

    Now I came across a bilingual document (from the 1930'ies), which uses
    the aforementioned MIDDLE DOT in the one language, and a clearly
    distinctive "raised dot/high dot" with the other: it's in line with
    the *top* edge of lining numerals and takes the same position
    basically, as U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK or U+02BC MODIFIER
    LETTER APOSTROPHE, but has the shape of a FULL STOP.

    While U+02D9 DOT ABOVE (from the spacing modifier letters) would seem
    a correct _graphical_ representative, I believe, it's use might be
    objectional:
    Given, that both FULL STOP, COMMA and MIDDLE DOT are of general
    category: Po (Punctuation, other), however, DOT ABOVE has general
    category Sk (Symbol, Modifier), (and it also has a binary property
    "diacritic"), the choice seems wrong. The use of the DOT ABOVE as a
    decimal separator would be a "misuse" of a character, not unlike the
    parallel situation when the MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE is used instead
    of RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.

    In view of these facts I was wondering, whether DOT ABOVE was the
    right character to use as the decimal point in the given context, or
    whether there is some other "dot above/high dot" character with the
    property "Po" which I missed.

    Thank you,
        Szabolcs



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