From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Jul 14 2009 - 01:14:48 CDT
On 7/13/2009 10:36 PM, Joe wrote:
>>>> In that case, Unicode has just what the doctor ordered:
>>>> U+FF61 HALFWIDTH IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP
>>>>
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>>> I beg to differ. What we need is *proportional* ideographic full stop
>>> (neither full with nor half width, i.e. not monospaced/fixed width).
>>>
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>> The characteristic of the two ideographic full stops is that they sit in
>> the left side of the character cell (at least that's a "typical" glyph
>> representation for them, even if variations occur). If that one-sidedness
>> is what you object to, then, in my view, you would indeed need a new character.
>>
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> A./,
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> Would it be correct to say that what is being discussed here is a character the same as U+FF61 HALFWIDTH IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP except having the EastAsianWidth property Na(rrow), same as plain old U+002E FULL STOP and the rest of ASCII?
>
> That would seem to represent Chao's presumed intention: his usage in Gwoyeu Romatzyh is, after all, specifically in the context of a romanization.
>
> Jou (Pinyin-free!)
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>
Here's the way I understand it (and I've jumped in sideways).
Fullwidth ideographic stop looks like this:
| o |
Halfwidth looks like this
|o |
in other words, the ball is in left field.
if you want just a plain
| o |
with very little side bearings on either side, then using one of the
existing characters for that purpose spells trouble, since your
preference goes counter to the expectation of font suppliers, rendering
engine implementers etc.
IFF you were to code a new character, that one would not get Na, but N
(neutral), which comes to the same thing as you describe. It would
become a character that's explicitly defined NOT to be an East Asian
character/
Now, to my view, the circle sits lower on the baseline than you get with
just putting the fullwidth full stop. In some software the Asian
characters might sit on a lower baseline, but that's far from universal,
so you are likely to see the full stop resting *on* the baseline.
This is not the case in the samples that the first poster provided -
here these characters are *bisected* by the base line.
What you have is a typographically the same thing as if you took the
U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN and moved its circle down from its superscript
position into a subscript position.
The two characters that come closest are U+02F3 MODIFIER LETTER LOW RING
and U+302D IDEOGRAPHIC ENTERING TONE MARK.
The latter is a combining mark (intended presumably for ideographs - and
therefore suspect in terms of whether typical implementations would
yield correct alignment with Latin letters). However, the placement of
this character relative to the baseline is close to what the samples
show - at least in some fonts.
The former may be too low: the sample glyph in the Unicode code charts
rests entirely below the baseline - depending on the font, even quite
far below.
A new character,
SUBSCRIPT RING
would be my recommendation
A./
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