From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 17:37:05 EDT
Kenneth Whistler said:
> And
> in this particular case, the usage of floor and ceiling symbols
> in math does not prevent recognizing that their usage *even in
> math* as bracketing pairs on symbols is delimiter- and punctuation-like
> in practice.
One may note the common use of the greater-than and less-than signs as
angle brackets in many publications including the Unicode standard. I
don't think that necessitates coding separate characters.
> Remember, folks, that Unicode is a *plain text* standard. Unless
> medievalists have some pretty compelling reason for *distinguishing*
> in their documents mathematical floor/ceiling notation from
> their textual conventions of corner bracketing, there really
> is nothing standing in the way of using the characters as
> recommended in the standard, except for an aversion to the specific
> design of the glyphs in the most widely available Unicode generic
> fonts.
But the half square brackets to me fall into a different category.
I am familiar with then from numerous published texts. They are indeed
widely used to indicate editorial insertion guesses for missing or
undecipherable material and I have never seen them look like anything
but the top *halves* of normal square brackets.
The ceiling characters as shown in the standard and in Kent Karlson's
paper don't fit in appearance. Of course medievalists and editors of
ancient middle-eastern texts will "have an aversion to the specific
design of the glyphs" since the design is wrong for half square brackets.
If I were editing texts using that convention and wished to stick to
Unicode I'd probably superscript U+23A1 LEFT SQUARE BRACKET UPPER CORNER
and U+23A4 RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET UPPER CORNER as the closest
approximation, kludge though that would be.
Left ceiling and right ceiling might do in plain text as a reasonable
reminder of the characters that should be used. Or 231C TOP LEFT CORNER
and 231B TOP RIGHT CORNER. But it would be like using the digit 3 for
yogh or ezh or Egyptian glottal stop. It works well enough to get the
meaning across, but it isn't the right character.
I'm not at all sure what "general-purpose corner brackets" are.
Jim Allan
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