Re: Roman numerals

From: Adam Twardoch (list.adam@twardoch.com)
Date: Sun Nov 25 2007 - 10:04:41 CST

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    James Kass wrote:
    > I was taught, way back in elementary school, to write Roman
    > numerals with connecting bars above and below. Those bars
    > distinguish the numerals from letters.
    I consider this a typographic practice, not a feature universally
    inherent to those numerals. There may be several different styles of
    writing European numerals (e.g. "old-style" vs. "lining") but nobody
    plans to encode them separately.

    The vast majority of text originators is not aware of the separate
    codepoints of Roman numerals and they use the Latin letters. This has
    been and continues to be common practice. Most popular software
    applications such as Microsoft Word use the Latin letters to represent
    Roman numerals for auto-numbering, not the extra codepoints. IMO, those
    extra codepoints never were alive and never will be.

    -- 
    Adam Twardoch
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