We debated this point early in Unicode's history, and decided not to encode
a decimal point character. It was felt that it would be too easily confused
in practice with the period or comma (depending on the viewed locale), and
that software would always have to deal with legacy data and mis-typed
characters in any event.
By the same reasoning, we ruled out other possible generic punctuation marks
that would have very different representations in different countries:
abbreviation mark, thousands-separator, double and single generic quotation
marks, etc.
If you want to represent the raised dot used with older style numbers, I
think the hyphenation point is the right character (but I don't remember
off-hand).
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
To: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 01:08 PM
Subject: Decimal Point
> Is there a Unicode character to represent a decimal point?
>
> In some English fonts (e.g., the one used to print the "New Scientist"),
> decimal points are centered and not located on the base line like FULL
> STOP. So full stop and the decimal point should probably not be unified
> for fine typography (even though they were in ASCII, just like
> HYPHEN-MINUS), but I can't find a decimal point character in Unicode
> 2.1.
>
> I am aware that there will be U+2396 DECIMAL SEPARATOR KEY SYMBOL in
> Unicode 3.0 (probably from ISO 9995), but I don't think this is quite
> the same.
>
> Markus
>
> --
> Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
> Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
>
>
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