From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 13:47:26 CST
From: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>
> Philippe,
>
>> The only approximate alternative is to not use the existing Roman
>> numerals
>> at all, and revert to Latin letters, and then use C, I, and OPEN O (which
> ^^^^^^
> no
>> looks quite similar to the turned C, except that the serif on is missing
>> on
>> the bottom leg, when drawn with serif fonts),
>
> It shouldn't be surprising that U+2183 ROMAN NUMERAL REVERSED ONE
> HUNDRED looks *exactly* like a reversed C, because that is what it
> is.
Oh God. I forgot it was absent only from the fonts I use. Sorry.
> Unlike the East Asian compatibility characters in the ranges
> U+2160..U+217F, the ligated forms and the reversed C in the
> range U+2180..U+2183 *are* intended for general use with the
> Latin alphabet in forming the types of Roman numerals that you
> are talking about.
>
>> or to replace the sequence
>> <I,TURNED C> by <D>, and possibly add joiner controls between them to
>> request (and may be force) their ligature.
>>
>> So to represent 888,888, ...
>
> Please recast this in terms of the characters encoded for such
> high numeric value expressions, and you'd get much closer to
> the intent.
>
> The convention of using rulings over strings of Latin letters
> to indicate higher values should be handled by styles, rather
> than by individual insertion of combining lines over single characters.
How do you do that in HTML or CSS? It's quite difficult to emulate (notably
the stretched M over groups of roman digits, but the macron/rulings are as
much difficult to place as it requires playing not only on the span of text,
but also playing with the whole formatting of the paragraph to change the
line height), and there are plenty of similar issues.
Once you start using those tricks, the text looses its accessibility, and
requires specific classes of devices to be correctly rendered. This is not
only a stylistic convention (how would you do if your renderer is not
visual? The renderer would have no other choice than changing the
semantics).
Arguably, the thousand multiplier has a plain-text meaning that should be
encodable as such. OK the ten multiplier is encoded with the reversed one
hundred roman numeral (what a bad name that does not reflect its effective
semantics!), but not the thousands.
Only some ligatures (namely the ONE THOUSAND CD and FIVE HUNDREDS), based on
only one of the rendering conventions, are encoded, and these ligatures are
much less known and used than the other conventions based on explicit and
distinct 10 or 1,000 multipliers.
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