From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Fri Nov 22 2002 - 02:40:31 EST
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:39:45 -0800
"Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net> wrote:
> > So can it be summarized that figures (both arabic and latin)
> > actually come in only one flavor (upper or lowercase), the other
> > being a variant glyph, and both kinds of roman numerals being
> > encoded for reasons other than their semantic meaning?
>
> Both kinds of Roman numerals were encoded for one reason only:
> compatibility with existing standards, as Ken mentioned.
That's what I meant by "other than their semantic meaning" - I put it
that way because I had been interested in the relationship between their
semantics and their being Unicode encoded.
> You cannot apply a variation selector (U+FE0x, or soon U+E01xx) to the
> ASCII digits to request a different glyph, at least not until Unicode
> explicitly defines such a variant sequence.
Then what's the way to distinguish between lining and text figures in
plain text? Can this distinction really only be achieved when
typesetting the text, by switching between two fonts, one for each kind
of numerals? Or am I missing some Unicode mechanism here?
Cheers, Thomas
-- Thomas Lotze thomas.lotze@gmx.net http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
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