From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 23:00:11 EST
Doug Ewell answered:
> Thomas Lotze <thomas dot lotze at uni dash jena dot de> wrote:
>
> > Why is it that while there are both uppercase and lowercase roman
> > numerals in the Unicode character set (in the Number Forms range), no
> > lowercase arabic numerals (old-style or text figures) are encoded? If
> > they are regarded as presentation forms of the uppercase numerals (in
> > the Basic Latin range), why is this not the case for their roman
> > counterparts?
>
> Because oldstyle numerals aren't really "lowercase" in the same sense as
> small letters (though some typographers think of them that way; see
> [1]). They're just glyph variants of the uniform-height "lining"
> numerals, so yeah, it's a character-glyph thing.
And to complete the answer for Thomas, the Roman numerals are
based on Latin letters, which *do* have upper/lowercase distinctions,
unlike digits. The compatibility Roman numerals in the Unicode
Standard (U+2160..U+217F) are derived from East Asian standards
which separately encoded upper- and lowercase forms, so would have
been required to be separately encoded just for compatibility
anyway.
--Ken
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