Re: Latin chi and stretched x

From: Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin_at_acssoft.de>
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2012 00:39:34 +0200

Am Mittwoch, 6. Juni 2012 um 09:55 schrieb Szelp, A. Sz.:

SAS> Michael wrote:
SAS> "As I say, stretched x is in a family of other x's with one or two
SAS> long feet, which may have rings or hooks on the end of them. But its
SAS> weight is clearly x-like -- by design. Where Teuthonista texts
SAS> occasionally used a "proper" Greek chi it is because of typographic
SAS> deficiency."

I second this. The real lower case Latin chi (used for IPA and for
some North American Indigenous orthographies) will show curves on the
upper left and lower right terminations like its uppercase
counterpart, which has to show such in any case to be distinguishable
from an uppercase Latin X.
The stretched x will look just like its name says, as it (as Michael
said) has to be in line with other related characters.

The fact that the italic forms in some fonts may look similar
is no argument for an unification, otherwise U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F
and U+0192 LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK had to be regarded as being
the same letter also.

It is also very likely that the Latin chi and the stretched x will be
used in the same environment. Both are phonetic letters, and are
likely to occur in the same texts especially when somebody presents
their transcription of Teuthonista sources into IPA.
This means that fonts designed for dialectology, containing
Teuthonista characters, usually will contain IPA characters also.
Thus, if the stretched x were unified with the chi, the design of the
stretched x would be fixed to the chi design, preventing it from
being designed in line with the other x forms (or, even worse, invite
the designer to make the other x forms inappropriately "chi-like").

SAS> ... but it's Michael himself who's recognized that
SAS> "Teuthonista suffers from a good deal of extraordinarily bad
SAS> typography" ...

This, however, is no excuse for continuing such bad typography into a
bad encoding which would carve in stone such a bad typography forever.

- Karl
Received on Wed Jun 06 2012 - 17:43:29 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Wed Jun 06 2012 - 17:43:31 CDT