Michael Everson wrote (in reply to Marco Cimarosti),
> >IMHO, the two characters in points 1 and 2 absolutely needed. Academic works > >which consider them as part of the script could not be encoded without them, > >while academic works which don't need them are not disturbed by their > >existence in the encoding. > > I didn't think so. Any counter-arguments to the above? > Point 1 concerns the Phaistonian virama. It might not have an Evans number, but neither do the separators. I'm with Marco, here. The combining diagonal stroke needs to be encoded, it's a distinct feature of the corpus and, as such, needs to be considered when the text is studied. <whimsey> If the dang thing is a comma, well, the difference between 'let's eat grandma' and 'let's eat, grandma' could signify the difference between whether the Phaistonians were family-oriented or cannibalistic. If it's truly a virama, then the opening string on Side A without the virama (TADARAYASHA) could mean something quite vulgar and unprintable, wheras with the virama (TADARAYASH) it clearly means "I, Darius..." </whimsey> Point 2 concerns the obliterated glyph glyph. Quoting from the Everson proposal for Egyptian hieroglyphics (N1944.PDF): "In general, these alternate formatting characters will be required also for representation of other scripts, such as Maya Hieroglyphs or Runic. Two of these marks identified as being particularly useful in a Mayan context are given at U+x326 -- U+x327. U+x325, EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHIC COMBINING CHARACTER SHADING shades not part of a broken quadrant per se, but a single damaged character in a cluster." While such a character need not be included in every paleographic script range, a unified character for this purpose would be useful. Just because mark-up has been suggested for this doesn't mean it's carved in stone yet. (Chipping off a bit of clay might have been the 17th century BCE equivalent of white-out.) As for directionality of the glyphs, the appearance of glyphs is rightly left to the font developer. (smile and groan) Best regards, James Kass.
