From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 10:09:46 CDT
Kent Karlsson wrote:
> And the Nameslist says:
> 002E FULL STOP
> = period, dot, decimal point
> * may be rendered as a raised decimal point in old style numbers
Right, I remembered there is such a comment somewhere but did not remember
where.
> However, I think that is a bad idea: firstly the digits here aren't
> necessarily "old style" (indeed, André wrote "lining", i.e. NOT
> old style). And even if they are old style, it seems to me to be a
> bad idea to make this a contextual rendering change for FULL STOP
> (and it also says "may" not "shall" so there is no way of knowing
> which rendering you should get even with old style digits).
I don't think the comment suggests the kind of contextual rendering you seem
to be thinking. It just says "may", without specifying what controls the
rendering and restricting raised rendering to old style numbers.
But admittedly, if you wish to use raised dot rendering, you will need
either some programmed logic that applies such style to FULL STOP in certain
contexts but not others (and this is nontrivial) or manual work that sets
the style of each FULL STOP used as decimal point.
> Better stay with the MIDDLE DOT for the raised decimal dot.
>
> Further, I don't see any major problem with using U+02D9 DOT ABOVE
> for "high dot" in this case.
I see several problems with both approaches. The rendering will depend on
font and may not be at all suitable for a raised dot. These characters have
properties different from those of FULL STOP, and you never know what this
may imply. Software that handles characters by their Unicode properties may
do unexpected and unsuitable things if some character just "looks adequate"
but has properties different from those of the character(s) that would be
semantically (more) correct.
Jukka
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