Note: this post is better read in a font distinguishing the 2 following
characters
ɡ U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G
g U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G
If you follow this link :
https://plus.google.com/photos/117306818777774106261/albums/5831399570749921169?authkey=COmLzZr3vPmNigE
you will find photos from a 1952 physics book by Louis de Broglie. While
reading it, I wondered about the identity of the character circled in
red, which was clearly neither G (in blue) nor g (in green), but
somewhere in between (both typographically and mathematically.)
I didn't find it in Unicode, but it's maybe in the DAM2 draft repertoire
(n4380), as *+A7AC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G proposed by Michael
Everson in n4030 “Proposal for the addition of five Latin characters to
the UCS”, because he needed an upper case conterpart to U+0261 ɡ LATIN
SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G for his “Ælɪsɪz Ədˈventʃəz ɪn ˈWʌndəlænd” book.
This example is obviously totally different, and to late to have any
influence on the encoding, but I think it might interest some reader of
this list.
However, it might also be an example of another character. If one
compares the green g's, the distinction between g U+0067 LATIN SMALL
LETTER G and ɡ U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G is clearly a
glyph/font property in this text, as the gⁱ in the text and the ɡⁱ in
the equation just below below correspond to the same physical quantity.
This character could therefore be a * LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SMALL G, a
kind of symmetric character to ɢ U+0262 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL G.
Some side remarks
I have no idea how the equations where typed (?) in these book, but the
characters seem to be too regular for me to be handwritten, so I guess
the printer had indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G in his character
set. I'd be happy to have any information and/or pointer about the way
scientific equations where typed (?) in the typewriter era.
And a converse (off topic) question : I don't know how to type this
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT/SMALL G in LaTex, which would be the obvious
rich-text format if I'd want to discuss the physics of these equations
instead of their typography.
Frédéric
