Scott Horne wrote:
...
> TeX fonts also encode several sizes of grouping characters (such as
> parentheses), radical signs, and other characters, and components
> from which to construct arbitrarily large ones. They distinguish
> text figures (so-called \oldstyle numerals) from lining figures.
> Will all these system-specific entities get space in Unicode, too?
I presume you mean aligning figures. The term *lining* figures is
usually used in typography to describe figures which align
horizontally, top and bottom, the way titling caps align.
On some typesetting systems there was a choice of eight different
kinds of figures (*not* counting superscript and subscript forms)
If you take the argument that tabular / aligning figures should be
distinguished from proportional / hanging or "oldstyle" figures
all the way why not encode all eight kinds of figures available on
some hot metal systems? God only knows how many forms of numbers
may have been developed in non-Latin scripts and cultures and how
these different forms may be used in various kinds of notation.
In India so-called "vedic mathematics" is a big thing - undoubtedly
this has it's own elaborate traditional system of notation - and
someone else has mentioned that in Germany "Deutsche Schrift" letters
are used for indicating vectors.
The Latin letters A B C D E and F are also used as figures in
hexadecimal notation - is someone going to propose that these
numerals are encoded too? How about the letters used in
Roman numerals?
Perhaps there should have only been one set of digits in the
Unicode standard and all forms of these figures in different
scripts and so on simply treated as glyph variants.
- Chris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT