On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Magda Danish (Unicode) wrote:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bernard Miller [mailto:forunicode@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 17, 2001 5:19 PM
> To: info@unicode.org
> Subject: 6 questions
>
>
> Hello,
>
> These are the questions I wanted to
> ask:
>
> 1. [snip]
> 6. Why does Unicode use "capital" vs "small letter"
> terminology instead of "uppercase" vs "lowercase"? It
> seems like lowercase is more descriptive than "small
> letter".
>
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Probably because "uppercase" and "lowercase" hark back to manual
typesetting (pre-desktop, pre-photocomposition, pre-Linotype) as Gutenberg
and Ben Franklin did it: one "case" containing the more used a-z was
almost horizontal at a stand up desk (the lower case) and behind it
and more nearly vertical was the upper case with less used capital
letters, A-Z. The person setting type picked wanted letters from both
cases and inserted them into a composing stick and they were then
transferred to the printing press. When printing was done they letters
were manually redistributed into their proper sections of the cases.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
Phone: 202 707-9612; Fax: 202 707-0955; US mail: I.T.S. Dev.Gp.4, Library
of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20540-9334 U.S.A.
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