From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 01:49:58 CDT
Dear Colleagues,
In processing a document, I came across a punctuation character which
I was not able to find in Unicode. As I find it hard to believe that
the character has not been encoded yet, I must think my search was
incomplete, and I'd be hoping that you can point me to the correct
character to use.
Generally, for the decimal point . (U+002E FULLSTOP) and , (U+002C
COMMA) is used in the SI world. However, earlier conventions could use
different notation, such as the common British raised dot which
centers with the lining digits (i.e. that would be U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT).
Now I came across a bilingual document (from the 1930'ies), which uses
the aforementioned MIDDLE DOT in the one language, and a clearly
distinctive "raised dot/high dot" with the other: it's in line with
the *top* edge of lining numerals and takes the same position
basically, as U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK or U+02BC MODIFIER
LETTER APOSTROPHE, but has the shape of a FULL STOP.
While U+02D9 DOT ABOVE (from the spacing modifier letters) would seem
a correct _graphical_ representative, I believe, it's use might be
objectional:
Given, that both FULL STOP, COMMA and MIDDLE DOT are of general
category: Po (Punctuation, other), however, DOT ABOVE has general
category Sk (Symbol, Modifier), (and it also has a binary property
"diacritic"), the choice seems wrong. The use of the DOT ABOVE as a
decimal separator would be a "misuse" of a character, not unlike the
parallel situation when the MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE is used instead
of RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.
In view of these facts I was wondering, whether DOT ABOVE was the
right character to use as the decimal point in the given context, or
whether there is some other "dot above/high dot" character with the
property "Po" which I missed.
Thank you,
Szabolcs
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