Re: Punctuation symbols for partial cuneiform characters

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 08:06:25 EDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Punctuation symbols for partial cuneiform characters"

    At 04:11 -0700 2003-09-03, Peter Kirk wrote:

    >What's the problem with these CEILING characters? They are
    >recommended not just "by some" but by the Unicode standard for
    >"general-purpose corner brackets". Do cuneiformists and medievalists
    >really need significantly different glyph shapes or properties? Do
    >they just not like the glyphs in existing fonts? Or is this a case
    >of the "not invented here" syndrome?

    I don't know what these floor and ceiling things are. I don't
    recognize them as "half square brackets" and neither do the
    specialists. Are these supposed to be half square brackets? Why
    weren't they encoded as punctuation? Why don't they have names that
    reflect that in any way?

    Right square bracket has a general category of Ps.
    Right parenthesis has a general category of Ps
    Right ceiling has a general category of Sm

    I report only that I have been to two unrelated meetings where the
    specialists complained that their punctuation characters were not
    encoded.

    >We really can't start adding to Unicode separate sets of visually
    >identical punctuation characters for each academic discipline. Are
    >we next going to get proposals for separate full stops and commas
    >for Egyptology, for cuneiform transliteration, and for medieval
    >Nordic?

    Of course not. Though there will be things you doubtless dislike.

    >Where does this stop?

    It stops when the overunifications are quashed, I guess. The work is
    slow, but we prevail. Vide Yogh, Coptic, Nuskhuri.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


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