Re: Rendering Raised FULL STOP between Digits

2013-03-10 4:57, Asmus Freytag wrote:

>> 'The Lancet' reportedly insists on the use of the raised decimal point
[…
> That's sensible advice, in a way, because B7 is in 8859-1 and therefore
> supported in a huge variety of fonts, for practical purposes, the
> coverage among non-decorative text fonts is pretty near universal.

This probably implies that most people who wish or need to use a raised
dot will keep using B7. And that’s fine for most purposes.

A new character would *allow* people to use raised dot, for which fonts
could contain suitable renderings that are independent of the demands of
B7 (especially due to its intended primary use as middle dot in some
languages). This would mostly be relevant to accurate coding of old
documents rather than to everyday needs of British writers.

According to “A history of mathematical notations” by Florian Cajori,
paragraph 286, the vertical position of the dot used as decimal
separator varied a lot in the 19th century. It varied from just a little
above the baseline up to the x-height and above, even to the top of
lining figures! I would expect that 20th century typography had similar
variation.

Of course, Unicode cannot encode all the possible vertical positions
(and sizes) of a raised dot. Such things would be normal glyph
variation, for stylistic or other reasons. The point is that no such
variation is realistic for B7.

Yucca
Received on Sun Mar 10 2013 - 10:26:27 CDT