Kenneth Whistler: > Christoph P�per asked: > >> writing "mm" as only one "m" with a macron above. > > Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations > should not be encoded as characters.
Although I've got no proof for it, I was told that it has also been used in print. > The text should just be represented as "m" + "m". Then, > if you wish to *render* such text in a font which mimics > this style of handwriting and uses such abbreviations, > then you would need the font to ligate "mm" sequences > into a *glyph* showing an "m" with an overbar. I constantly confuse "glyph", "character" etc., but wouldn't such a glyph need a Unicode code point? "mm" sequences shouldn't be abreviated if they appear in a compound word as the junction, thus you couldn't simply ligate all. I'm really not that much into font design / creation, so probably what you say is perfectly reasonable. > To do otherwise, either representing the plain text content > as <m, combining-macron> or with a newly encoded m-macron > character, would just distort the *content* of the text, I agree on "m�", but couldn't m-macron be said to be of equal meaning as "mm", like U+017F approx. equals "s"? > If and only if an m-macron became a part of the accepted, > general orthography of German You mean like "�", the ligature of long-s and s? > would it make sense to start > representing textual content in terms of such a character. It most probably never will, after it missed its chance early in the last century--actually I've never seen such text myself, I was just curious. I still wonder why there are m-acute and m-dot (old Irish Gaelic orthography) in Latin Extended Additional and several other characters (glyphs?) I've never seen and don't have a use note, but not m-macron. I accept that there'll be no more new such "letters", but who forgot m- and n-macron? > And in such a hypothetical future, you would use <m, > combining-macron>, because it already exists in Unicode, But wouldn't that become either "m" or "m�" instead of the correct "mm" when converted to e.g. ISO-8859-1? I guess in such a hypothetical future people would read "Rom�el" for "Rommel" almost fluently, but would definitely wonder about "Romel". Just like "�" can't be replaced by a single "s" but "ss" (or in certain cases "\017Fs"). Btw.: Wouldn't things be easier, e.g. for automatic text transformation, if there was an uppercase "�" that looks just like double capital S? Christoph P�per, who's now looking for the abbreviation of "-burg", ~"-b\0306g"
