On 7/28/2010 2:02 AM, Kent Karlsson wrote:
Den 2010-07-28 09.50, skrev "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi>:
André Szabolcs Szelp wrote:
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).
The different dot-like characters are quite a mess, but the case of British
raised dot is simple: it is regarded as typographic variant of FULL STOP.
Ref.: http://unicode.org/uni2book/ch06.pdf (second page, paragraph with
run-in heading "Typographic variation").
And the Nameslist says:
002E FULL STOP
= period, dot, decimal point
* may be rendered as a raised decimal point in old style numbers
However, I think that is a bad idea: firstly the digits here aren't
necessarily "old style" (indeed, André wrote "lining", i.e. NOT
old style). And even if they are old style, it seems to me to be a
bad idea to make this a contextual rendering change for FULL STOP
(and it also says "may" not "shall" so there is no way of knowing
which rendering you should get even with old style digits).
Better stay with the MIDDLE DOT for the raised decimal dot.
The real problem I have with this annotation is that it recommends a
practice that I strongly suspect has never been implemented in the
entire 20 years since it's been on the books. (If anyone knows of an
implementation that has contextual rendering of FULL STOP, I'd like to
learn about it here.)
If a particular text uses both raised periods and raised decimal points,
then I see use in being able to use 002E for this and make it change by
using a font with a different glyph. But if it applies only to the
decimal point, overloading 002E would require a degree of context
analysis that I believe is unimplemented (see above). If my suspicion is
true, then, at the minimum, the annotation should be reworded so that it
doesn't seem to imply a practice that doesn't exist.
Further, I don't see any major problem with using U+02D9 DOT ABOVE
for "high dot" in this case.
Me neither - if it's positioned right, then it should be used.
Duplicating "dots" by function is definitely a no-no. However, unfiying
punctuation characters with definite differences in appearance only
works well if these differences are systematically applied with a
type-style (font) selection and then apply to the entire text in each
font. Such as the use of a double oblique glyph for HYPHEN (and
HYPHEN-MINUS) in Fraktur fonts.
A./
