On 02/11/2018 17:20, Janusz S. Bień via Unicode wrote:
On Fri, Nov 02 2018 at 5:09 -0700, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
[...]
To transcribe the postcard would mean selecting the characters
appropriate for the printed equivalent of the text.
You seem to make implicit assumptions which are not necessarily
true. For me to transcribe the postcard would mean to answer the needs
of the intended transcription users.
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).
As I wrote already some time ago on the list, the alternative "encoding
or using a specialized font" is wrong. These days texts are encoding for
processing (in particular searching), rendering is just a kind of
side-effect.
Indeed, not using MODIFIER LETTER SMALL R to encode the r in "Mʳ" would
make it harder to retrieve the "Magister" abbreviation in a database.
Eg Bing Search having less extended equivalence classes when I tested
it for mathematical preformatted letters, it was able to retrieve them
precisely. Perhaps it still is.
Best regards,
Marcel
