Re: Characters consisting of vertical lines; Possible attempts to encode tally marks

From: Guy Steele (Guy.Steele@Sun.COM)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2007 - 13:53:47 CST

  • Next message: Richard Wordingham: "Re: Characters consisting of vertical lines; Possible attempts to encode tally marks"

    The tally marks currently under discussion are widely
    used in Europe, Australia, and North America. But
    I have observed my friends from Japan using another
    system, and therefore just now did a quick Google search.
    While you all are at it, you may want to investigate the other
    two systems of tally marks described in the Wikipedia article
    on tally marks:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks

    --Guy Steele

    On Feb 28, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Kent Karlsson wrote:

    >
    > Jon Hanna wrote:
    >> Agreed (though its option g). I'm not seeing how tallies work
    >> in static
    >> text other than as glyph variants for U+0031 through U+0035
    >
    > One thing is absolutely certain here: Tally marks are definitely
    > NOT glyph variants of 1-5. They have the values 1-5, but that is
    > something entirely different.
    >
    > I think tally marks are just as justified (or justifiable) as
    > card faces, dice faces, chess symbols, domino faces, and the
    > like. Or actually, more justifiable, since tally marks are
    > regularly written (it does not matter that it is by hand,
    > usually), which the above listed symbols rarely are.
    >
    > I, for one, would argue that the tally mark characters all
    > should have the same advance width, as in handwriting one
    > would not start a tally (of value 1) unless there is space
    > for a full tally (of value 5) to the right of the begun tally.
    > So in ASCII, fixed width font, the first four tally marks could
    > be *approximated* by "| ", "|| ", "||| ", "||||".
    >
    > /kent k
    >
    >

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