William, Yes, I am very interested in the Unicode aspects of handling multiple glyphs of one Greek character. My original thoughts were to use the PUA, but some knowledgeable people have suggested I ask for advice on this list for ideas before using the PUA.
Essentially, I have two issues. First is the encoding of multiple glyphs for one Greek character. Please see http://parthia.com/fonts/images/alt-charmap.jpg for the current layout of the glyphs. The font will also contain a few numismatic symbols not already in the Unicode. Compounding this problem is that OpenType substitution features do not seem to be widely supported and I need a usable font in the near future that works across the spectrum of Unix, Mac, and Windows applications, including sorting in databases. Second problem is the construction of a (second and distinct?) font that contains over a thousand Hellenistic monograms which James Kass has accurately identified in another message of this thread. I have some 20 Mac Type 1 fonts containing the glyphs and can post samples if asked. These monogram fonts are currently used by scholars, museums and commercial firms in publishing catalogs of numismatic items. My font-making efforts will concern only the Hellenistic, Parthian and Bactrian monograms, but there are probably tens of thousand of them if all the coinage through history is considered. Cheers, Chris Hopkins > This looks an interesting discussion and I hope that you will ask your > questions in this forum. > > The matter of multiple alternate glyphs for each character seems at first a > font issue, and it is partly a font issue, yet it is also a Unicode issue > once one starts trying to encode a document which is intended to apply those > glyphs in some controlled selection manner. For example, are you going to > have some texts such as "Author A uses the symbol X for beta whereas author > B uses the symbol Y for beta." where X and Y are just two of the "multiple > alternate glyphs" which you mentioned? > > What please is a Hellenistic monogram? I am wondering whether this is going > to be a good application of the Private Use Area, either on a permanent > basis or on a temporary basis pending making a formal encoding application. > In either case, reading about the Private Use Area in Chapter 13 of the > Unicode specification available from the http://www.unicode.org webspace may > prove interesting. > > William Overington > > 4 April 2003
