Re: Too narrowly defined: DIVISION SIGN & COLON

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:57:01 +0300

2012-07-10 13:50, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Asmus Freytag, Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:32:47 -0700:
[…]
>> The proper thing to do would be to add these usages to the list of
>> examples of known contextually defined usages of punctuation
>> characters, they are common enough that it's worth pointing them out
>> in order to overcome a bit of the inherent bias from Anglo-Saxon
>> usage.
[…]
> Where do I find the (existing) examples? In the PDF version of the
> spec?

I’m not sure what Asmus meant, but I have thought that we are primarily
discussing the annotations in the code charts, such as
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf
Information extracted from those charts is also available, perhaps in
more useful ways, e.g. in the UniBook Character Browser, the BabelPad
editor, and the Fileformat.info website (though they are not always
up-to-date and they are not normative sources of information).

> For instance, would be possible, in the the
> NamesList, or some other field that look-up tools uses, to get a link
> from e.g. COLON to DIVISION SIGN, and vice versa?

No, I don’t think that’s possible. But the code charts are what people
use, or should use, so they are suitable for the purpose, even though
they don’t use hyperlinks but just verbal references. (Hyperlinks are
possible in PDF format, too, of course, but setting them up can be a
major effort.)

> My candidate characters, this round, are:
>
> DIVISION SIGN (÷) as minus sign.
> COLON (:) as division sign.
> MIDDLE DOT (·) as multiplication symbol.

Well, MIDDLE DOT is relatively often used as multiplication symbol, so
it might be notified, but according to ISO 80000-2, the correct dot-like
multiplication symbol is DOT OPERATOR. There’s a possibility of creating
misunderstandings if MIDDLE DOT is explicitly mentioned as a
multiplication symbol. Such usage is indirectly referred to, or at least
alluded to, by the cross-reference (of type “see also”) to 22C5 DOT
OPERATOR in the chart.

Yucca
Received on Tue Jul 10 2012 - 06:58:47 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Tue Jul 10 2012 - 06:58:48 CDT