Christoph P�per asked: > I recently learned in <news:de.etc.sprache.deutsch> that there has been a > tradition (in handwritten text more than in print) of writing "mm" as only > one "m" with a macron above. I can't find any such character in Unicode, > just U+1E3F and U+1E41. > You could of course build something similar with "m"+U+0305 to resemble the > look, but that won't become "mm" (just "m" or "m�") after a conversion to > e.g. ISO-8859-1. > > Should such a character be added to Unicode (or did I miss it)?
Neither. Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations should not be encoded as characters. 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. 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, which is what the character encoding should be about. If and only if an m-macron became a part of the accepted, general orthography of German would it make sense to start representing textual content in terms of such a character. And in such a hypothetical future, you would use <m, combining-macron>, because it already exists in Unicode, and there is no point to encoding another canonically equivalant precomposed character for that sequence. --Ken
