From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Apr 11 2003 - 17:30:10 EDT
Pim Blokland wrote:
> Another candidate for for the Awful Character names would be U+0192.
>
> Its formal designation in the database is Latin letter small f with
> hook.
> This is OK. However, this poor little overworked character has two
> extra jobs:
>
> 1) It doubles as the guilder (florin) sign. In fact, this use is
> more widespread than the f with hook.
> Were we to accept this use, it wouldn't just be the name that would
> have to be changed; the general category and bidirectional category
> would change as well. And of course it wouldn't have an uppercase
> equivalent mapping.
> Even the appearance would change: while the f with hook looks like,
> well, an roman f with a left hook, the guilder looks like an italic
> f. It's not the same character at all!
> Suggested info for the UnicodeData database:
> 0192;GUILDER SIGN;Sc;0;ET;;;;;N;;;;;
As Michael points out, this has long been known, and people
have been living with the ambiguity for years. But if an
unambiguous florin/guilder currency sign is desired, it
is a matter of developing the proposal summary form and
championing it to convince the committees to encode another
currency sign.
Note, however, that the characters in legacy character sets
to which U+0192 maps have themselves been used ambiguously.
So this is similar, in some regards, to such famously overloaded
ASCII characters as U+007E TILDE or U+0027 APOSTROPHE.
>
> 2) The SGML definition calls it "function of". HTML entity name:
> ƒ. It now suddenly is a mathematical character.
> In this case too, not just the name should be changed, lots of other
> categories as well. And the appearance: to differentiate from a
> normal f, function of is often written as a script-f. (The irony is
Nope. This one is off the table:
1D453;MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL F;Ll;0;L;<font> 0066;;;;N;;;;;
1D4BB;MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT SMALL F;Ll;0;L;<font> 0066;;;;N;;;;;
And it is the mathematical *italic* form which is appropriate
for functions (if distinguished from the normal f, U+0066),
rather than the mathematical *script* form.
> that this is exactly how it was called in Unicode 1.0.)
> Suggested info in the UnicodeData database:
> 0192;FUNCTION OF;Sm;0;ON;;;;;Y;;;;;
^^ ^^ ^
See above. I would disagree about all of these property assignments.
>
> You know what? It won't work. Can't cram three different characters
> into the same codepoint. Forget it...
It's been done before. ;-)
--Ken
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