Now I presume from Michael's assertion that there is some Athabascan community *somewhere* that has started to make an initial case distinction for glottal stop, and that in the fonts they use, their uppercase glottal stop *looks like* the IPA glottal stop, and that for the body text they innovated a miniature of same. Hence the conclusion that we must treat the existing form as the *capital* and need to encode a new lowercase form.
That's right. Peter Constable posted an example.
That, however, is utterly backward. It is clear that in these cases, following 100 years of monocase usage of glottal stop, that the innovation (as in many adaptations of IPA) is to create an uppercase letter to go with the lowercase one.
All right.
[By the way, I would like to get references to the actual users and examples of their materials, to see just how widespread this innovation actually is.]
As would I.
In terms of font design, I concur with John Hudson's sense of what would look harmonious as an uppercase/lowercase pairing for a glottal stop in a typical font. However, to accord with general IPA usage and the existing fonts showing U+0294 should stay as they are. Then, *if* it turns out that there is a convincing case to be made for separate encoding of an uppercase glottal stop for such Athabascan usage as may turn up, then the least damaging approach would be, for the code charts, to use the kinds of uppercase glyph models used in similar instances of after-the-fact uppercase inventions based on IPA or other phonetic alphabets and usages.
A modified capital P would probably do.
If this is then augmented with examples showing good typographic practice and actual examples of text distinguishing uppercase and lowercase glottal stop, that should be sufficient to let people then design and use their fonts as desired, without disturbing the identity of the already existing encoded character, U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP.
I won't fight you on this one. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
