Re: Greek curled beta in Unicode code chart

From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Sun Jul 03 2005 - 08:34:50 CDT

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Greek curled beta in Unicode code chart"

    On Sunday 03 July 2005 16:06, David Perry wrote:
    > The various alternate Greek letter shapes (curly beta, curly rho,
    > "script" kappa, etc.) were put in Unicode because they were present
    > in pre-Unicode character sets.  They really don't belong in Unicode
    > because they do not follow the encoding model that Unicode is based
    > on (encoding characters not glyphs).

    David,

    I understand your reasons (in fact, I was aware of all them before
    starting this thread), but please consider the following.

    First, curly beta is a special case among other "symbol" Greek
    letters, because it is not just an alternate form. For example, there
    are no (or very few of) editions were 8-shaped epsilon is used alongside
    with lunate epsilon, or or straight phi with looped phi. However, for
    curly beta there is a stable tradition, which assigns to it a special
    role, different from beta with descender.

    After browsing some sites (including French ones) I have an impression
    that this tradition was abandoned for some time due to a lack of
    appropriate fonts, but now more and more people in France start using
    curly beta again, although the only way to access it for now is typing
    U+03D0 directly. That's just because in the French tradition initial and
    medial beta were always treated as completely separate glyphs, like
    standard and final sigma in the rest of the world.

    Second, particularly I would prefer to always type beta as U+03B2,
    exactly as you recommend, and access its medial form via advanced
    typography features, if possible. That's because I don't consider
    the French rule to be mandatory *for me*, and I can live without
    curly beta, if it is not available. The problem is that
    for a font designer there is no reason to include a special version
    of the glyph, if there is already one, encoded at U+03D0. So,
    even if one provides in his font a special rule for substitution
    of curly beta (BTW, it is not so clear, which OT feature should
    be used for this purpose), this rule will just draw U+03D0
    instead of U+03B2 in user's application. This means the question
    about the correct look of U+03D0 still remains actual.

    -- 
    Regards,
    Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru>
    Moscow State University
    Historical Faculty
    


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