Re: symbols for `born' and `died' + guarani sign

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Feb 23 2003 - 14:26:42 EST

  • Next message: David Oftedal: "Re: symbols for `born' and `died'"

    Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu dot org> wrote:

    > At least in Germany it is quite common to indicate the birth year with
    > a leading black five-pointed star and the death year with a leading
    > cross, resembling a dagger. Similarly, the year of marriage is
    > depicted as two intertwined circles. How will this be represented in
    > Unicode? Are there characters for it?

    and also:

    > I've found a glyph in Jörg Knappen's TC fonts (text companion fonts
    > for his EC font family for TeX) called `guarani sign' for the currency
    > of Paraguay. It is a capital letter G with a vertical bar through the
    > whole glyph.

    I think the "five-pointed star" used to denote a birth year is just an
    asterisk, U+002A. If you need something that really looks like a
    five-pointed star, try U+2605.

    The dagger representing a death year is U+2020. Ken Whistler had a
    pertinent comment on this particular case:

    http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m10/0447.html

    Remember that these are just symbols, so rather than requiring a new
    symbol with your particular semantics, it's OK to find something already
    encoded that "looks right" and use it (an exception to Jukka Korpela's
    otherwise-sound advice).

    I can't find the two intertwined circles or the G with vertical bar, so
    these *may* be candidates for encoding in a future version of Unicode if
    a proper proposal is written and accepted. (These e-mail discussions do
    not constitute a proposal, though they may be the foundation for one.)
    In the meantime, I'd just use "PYG" for the Paraguayan currency symbol.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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