Am Dienstag, 29. Januar 2002 um 17:07 schrieb Stefan Persson: SP> In old Swedish there was a tradition of writing words of foreign origin in SP> the Roman type of letters (in Swedish referred to as "antikva"), while the SP> rest of the words were written in Fraktur. ...
Am Dienstag, 29. Januar 2002 um 19:39 schrieb Marco Cimarosti: MC> I have seen the same usage in German, on an old Duden dictionary: words of MC> foreign origins and etymologies were in Roman, the rest being in Fraktur. This is still valid for Fraktur typesetting according to the *actual* Duden, at least to the edition of 1996 which I have (21th edition; the one which introduced the new German ortography which became effective 1998). See page 66. The Duden uses e.g. the following example: Das sinkende Schiff sandte SOS-Rufe. (The sinking ship emitted SOS calls.) fff Ffffffff ffffff Ffffff aaaffffff (f=Fraktur (i.e. Blackletter), a=Antiqua (i.e. Roman), F=U+017F in Fraktur) While in Swedish this is a *tradition* according to Stefan, in German it is even a *rule*. The Duden says: "Fremdsprachige W�rter und Wortgruppen ... sind im Fraktursatz als Antiqua zu setzen", i.e. "Words of foreign languages and groups of them ... have to be typeset in Roman within Fraktur typesetting". This may be an argument proving that the Fraktur/Roman differentation can be a matter of text rather than of higher level protocols, as in fact claimed by Stefan. On the other hand, Fraktur is too obviously a variant of the Latin script to be encoded separately. Maybe something like a "ROMAN VARIANT SELECTOR" would be appropriate: If this appears after a character which is (by means of a higher level protocol) to be displayed in Fraktur otherwise, that character is to be displayed in Roman. In other circumstances, this selector can be ignored. This selector could fulfill another important purpose: If this selector appears after a U+017F (long s), this character is only to be displayed as "long s" when it is (by means of a higher level protocol) to be displayed in Fraktur. Otherwise it is to be displayed as U+0073 (lower case "s"). This would allow German (and maybe Swedish etc.) texts to be encoded in a way that they can be displayed correctly in Fraktur as well as in Roman. The German orthographic rules require that a normal s (U+0073) is to be used when using Roman script where a long s (U+017F) is to be used when using Fraktur script. -- Karl Pentzlin AC&S Analysis Consulting & Software GmbH M�nchen, Germany
