Re: U+25CA LOZENGE - why is it in the "Mac OS Roman" character set (and therefore widespread in current fonts)?

From: Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:38:48 +0100

On 13 Aug 2012, at 15:20, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Mac fonts also included ƒ (LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK). This was due to the fact that names of folders used the name 'foo ƒ] - or 'foo U+0192', if you wish. It was, however, usually only when the system or an app created a folder name that the ƒ was added. Humans creating a folder name seldom added it, I think.

No, humans learnt to do it. And we still do: it's right there on alt-f on the US/GB/IE keyboards. It's unfortunate that this italic character which is really the same thing as the florin sign was unified with the African Ƒƒ because I am sure it makes fonts tend to be unsuitable for African use. In fact Just looking at it in this e-mail I see that my own ƒ is not really suitable, as it should be as long as a j. fjƒɲ. I[m going to go fix that.

> So I suspect that U+25CA ◊ LOZENGE was used in some visible place in
> the system and/or in applications. I have used Mac since roughly System
> 7, but I don't remember what the U+25CA ◊ LOZENGE was used for. But I
> have a vague memory of having seen it in some outline - thus, where the
> bullets are used e.g. in HTML unordered lists (<ul>). If so, then it
> was a character that, like the ƒ, was not typed by users very often.

Less so than the ƒ, but many of us learnt to use the ƒ for our folder names.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Mon Aug 13 2012 - 09:40:57 CDT

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