On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, John Hudson wrote: > At 13:07 11/7/2002, John Cowan wrote: > >Wouldn't the glyph for the GETA SIGN be suitable as a .notdef glyph? > >That seems to be just what GETA is for. > > Aha! Thank you, I'd never noticed that before. I think the GETA MARK would > be ambiguous to a non CJK user, but I like the idea of the strong > horizontal bars very much.
GETA MARK is also ambiguous to Chinese readers; an "M"-sized WHITE SQUARE or WHITE CIRCLE (or LARGE CIRCLE) are more familiar. I'm not familiar with how the GETA MARK is supposed to be used in Japanese, but I hesitate to blur the possible distinction between 1) "there's a character here but you don't see it because the font is missing a glyph", 2) "there's no character here for you to see because what the author would like to put there is not encoded in Unicode", and 3) "there is expected to be something here (e.g., a letter, an ideograph, etc) but the author doesn't even know what it is" (e.g., transcribing a tablet with broken pieces or paper with insect damage, or undecipherable/illegible source text). I don't think the distinction between #2 and #3 need or should be standardized at this level--it is up to a convention that the author should establish with the reader, as with any specialized notation--but there is certainly a difference between #1 (author succeeds in writing but reader fails in viewing) and #2/#3 (author fails in writing). Given the current white box/rectangle (or other symbols) for notdef, if I see one of those, I really don't know if my font is defective, or if the author volunatarily put it there to signify something. Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
