* Philippe Verdy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-04-16 01:22]: > > U+0387 GREEK ANO TELEIA > wrong form? it's a small square, and is the greek semicolon, and is then > separating words.
U+0387 is canonically equivalent to U+00B7. About its shape, whether it's square or round depends on what the full stop looks like in that font - they should look exactly the same, only the "ano teleia" (upper dot) should be at x-height.
If two characters are canonically equivalent, they can't have a consistently distinct appearance. Nevertheless, most fonts appear to give a different glyph to 0387 than to 00B7, not only in height, but also in weight. (See attached sample). If data is normalized, the appearance of ano teleia will change (since 0387 will change into 00B7) and users will be disappointed.
In any environment where data are normalized, getting the correct appearance requires the use of OpenType with language dependent glyph selection (and a layout engine that supports this - or the use of a Greek specific font.
A./
PS: it's water under the bridge by now, but in my opinion, this is another example of questionable unification of punctuation based on considering only the 'ink' and not the positioning of it. If one is considering only the roughest of plain text, having only a single code for a 'dot somewhere in the middle of the line' yields acceptable results, but it does make the use of such plain text as back-bone for typographically correct rendering unnecessarily difficult. The extreme form of such 'plain text only' approach is using ` and ' as stand-in for the single quotes.
However, for paleo punctuation, where there's no comparable established typographical tradition requiring consistent differentiation, the use of unified punctuation is preferable.
<<attachment: 00B7_samples.gif>>
