Re: Does HYPHEN BULLET have synonyms?

2013-02-22 19:46, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Questions: Shouldn’t HYPHEN BULLET be on in the NamesList of
> HYPHEN-MINUS? And shouldn‘t HYPHEN BULLET have HYPHEN-MINUS in its
> NamesList?

The comments at the start of NamesList.txt say that it is
“semi-automatically derived from UnicodeData.txt”, but the information
you are referring to has actually been picked up from the code charts.
They contain both informative alias names and cross references.

Since HYPHEN BULLET and HYPHEN can hardly be considered as aliases of
each other, the issue is whether a cross-reference is useful. The
standard says (Ch. 17, p. 575):

“Cross references (preceded by →) are used to indicate a related
character of interest, but without indicating the nature of the
relation. Possibilities are a different character of similar appearance
or name, the other member of a case pair, or some other linguistic
relationship.
[…]
Cross references are neither exhaustive nor symmetric. Typically a
general character would have cross references to more specialized
characters, but not the other way around.”

So there is no necessity of adding a cross-reference; they are practical
notes added to help people who search for a character.

I guess a cross reference from HYPHEN to HYPHEN BULLET could be useful,
to indicate that when considering the use of a hyphen, there is an
alternative character that might be more suitable for use as a list item
marker. It would be rather implicit, though, since there is no verbal
comment about HYPHEN BULLET in the chart, so its intended use is to be
inferred from its name. The character is a bit of a mystery, but I
suppose there are some legacy character codes that distinguish between
BULLET and HYPHEN BULLET – otherwise, it would be basically a stylistic
difference to be handled at the typographic level.

(By the way, the relatively few fonts that contain HYPHEN BULLET do not
exhibit any consistent of idea of how it should visually relate to HYPHEN.)

Yucca
Received on Fri Feb 22 2013 - 16:06:41 CST