Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

Suppose someone found a hundred year old form from Poland which included a section for "sign your name" and "print your name" which had been filled out by a man with the typically Polish name of Bogus McCoy?  And he was a Magister, to boot!  And proud of it.

If he signed the magister abbreviation using double-underlined superscript and likewise his surname *and* printed it the same way -- it might still be arguable as to whether it was a writing/spelling or a stylish distinction, I suppose.

But if he signed using double-underlined superscripts and printed using baseline lower case Latin letters, *that* might be persuasive.

Doesn't seem likely, though, does it?

(Bogusław is a legitimate Polish masculine given name.  Its nickname is Bogus.  McCoy is not, however, a typical Polish surname.  The snarky combination of "Bogus McCoy" was irresistible to someone of my character and temperament.  "Bogus" is American slang for fake and "McCoy" connotes being genuine, as in "the real McCoy".)

Where a contemporaneous printed form of a writing system exists, it appears Unicode will generally base encoding decisions on it and not on handwritten forms. Like the case we discussed a few posts above about German, any differences in appearance typical for the handwritten form would be handled by styling (e.g. selection of a "handwriting" font).

To transcribe the postcard would mean selecting the characters appropriate for the printed equivalent of the text.

If the printed form had a standard way of superscripting letters with a decoration below when used for abbreviations, then, and only then would we start discussing whether this decoration needs to be encoded, or whether it is something a font can supply as part of rendering the (sequence of) superscripted letters. (Perhaps with the aid of markup identifying the sequence as abbreviation).

All else is just applying visual hacks to simulate a specific appearance, at the possible cost of obscuring the contents.

A./