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

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2007 - 14:12:11 CST

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

    Jon Hanna wrote on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:46 PM

    > Tallies are either a dynamic way to keep a tally and as such cannot be
    > meaningfully used in static text, or are used stylistically as glyph
    > variants of the numbers 1 through 5 which are already encoded at U+0031
    > through U+0035.

    They aren't glyph variants of them at all. The properties are wrong. They
    are definitely not digits, let alone decimal digits. If the first three are
    glyph variants of any series, they are glyph variants of U+2161..3 ROMAN
    NUMERAL ONE..THREE. In terms of their behaviour, however, I think the
    closest analogue is U+10320 OLD ITALIC NUMERAL ONE. That seems to have all
    the right properties for doing the tallies until you get to the 'gate'. For
    right-to-left tallies, U+10916 PHOENICIAN NUMBER ONE will probably do the
    job.

    As I was writing, Kent Karlsson has just posted that tallies of 1 to 4
    should all have the same advance width. I disagree. If I write text after
    completing a tally, I don't deliberately leave a gap for the tally to
    increase. If I were to do that, I would also leave a gap for further blocks
    of five.

    Richard.



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