From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 16:35:20 CDT
In light of Ken's reply it's probably not worthwhile going into the details
on all points of your answer. However there are a few points were, like
John, I feel you and I are simply talking past each other. Let me pick just
one item:
At 01:07 PM 6/10/2004, Michael Everson wrote:
>In any case -- and I think this is the precedent I am looking for -- this
>is a "script" capital Q in the same way that U+0261 is a script g. It is
>**not** unified with U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G.
>
>It's not a precedent, since the use of the word 'script' has different
>meaning in both cases.
>
>No, it doesn't. Your mathematical "script" has a meaning which is
>different from the one which applies to the IPA [g] and from the one I had
>in mind when I named the character.
The early namers used the term 'script' rather indiscriminantly. For
example they applied it to 2118 which they called SCRIPT CAPITAL P, even
though, typographically it's a calligraphic lower case p and would have
been better called *WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION (that is now annotated in
the names list). Similarly, the character at 2113 so called SCRIPT SMALL L
is now annotated as
= mathematical symbol 'ell'
* despite its character name, this symbol is derived from a
special italicized version of the small letter l
since that's what it is. We've in fact had to add a separate MATHEMATICAL
SMALL SCRIPT L since. Similarly, the letters 0251 for which the Unicode 1.0
name was LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT A and 0261 are not 'script' forms in the
same way as used correctly for e.g. 2130, 2131, etc. in the Letterlike
Symbols block.
The mathematical alphanumerics are simply additional instances of
letterlike symbols. If we can unify the historic symbol for Mark used in
Germany with 2133, even though its shape allows less variation than that
allowed for mathematical script fonts, we can certainly unify other uses
that are letter-like.
Sometimes I suspect that the fact that you are not conversant with
mathematical notation, but very familiar with linguistic notations, makes
you treat these two as worlds apart. However, both are specialized
technical notations, and both share the feature that if you changed the
font on any letter sufficiently far, you would destroy the meaning.
In that way, both are different from regular 'language text' where you can
transpose the text into different font styles, and preserve the meaning.
A./
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