From: Wm Sean Glen (rexlibris@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Feb 18 2003 - 21:18:16 EST
Dear David,
There is a letter in the Swedish alphabet (capital A with a ring above). Some Swede by the name of Ångstrøm was a scientist and worked with light and color. He came up with a convenient was to accurately measure the color of light. That measurement was named after him and given the symbol (capital A with a ring above). The next time you see one of those laser pointer pens take a look at the label. It will say 670 nm which means 670 nanometers. The red light has a wavelength of 670 billionths of a meter. An Ångstrøm is equal to ten nanometers so that red light would be described as 67Å. When Kodak develops your film, they calibrate their equipment by looking for some common color like sky blue and making that equal to a standard Ångstrøm value. I don't know why Unicode implemented it twice. We use a regular old k for kilo and M for Mega. When it comes to other scientific symbols, we still use a Greek uppercase omega to represent ohms of electrical resistance and lowercase omega to represent rotational speed.
Wm Seán Glen
-----Original Message-----
From: David Oftedal <david@start.no>
To: unicode@unicode.org <unicode@unicode.org>
Date: Saturday, February 15, 2003 8:54 AM
Subject: Ångstrøm symbol
Hi,
One of you mentioned that Unicode is reluctant to make symbols for
things like TM, that are really only composed of other characters.
Yet I read on someone's website that there's an Ångstrøm (Or Ångström, I
Am Not A Swede) symbol that's exactly identical to the Scandinavian Å.
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