Doug Ewell answered: > Thomas Lotze <thomas dot lotze at uni dash jena dot de> wrote: > > > Why is it that while there are both uppercase and lowercase roman > > numerals in the Unicode character set (in the Number Forms range), no > > lowercase arabic numerals (old-style or text figures) are encoded? If > > they are regarded as presentation forms of the uppercase numerals (in > > the Basic Latin range), why is this not the case for their roman > > counterparts? > > Because oldstyle numerals aren't really "lowercase" in the same sense as > small letters (though some typographers think of them that way; see > [1]). They're just glyph variants of the uniform-height "lining" > numerals, so yeah, it's a character-glyph thing.
And to complete the answer for Thomas, the Roman numerals are based on Latin letters, which *do* have upper/lowercase distinctions, unlike digits. The compatibility Roman numerals in the Unicode Standard (U+2160..U+217F) are derived from East Asian standards which separately encoded upper- and lowercase forms, so would have been required to be separately encoded just for compatibility anyway. --Ken
