2013-03-10 4:57, Asmus Freytag wrote:
'The Lancet' reportedly insists on the use of the raised decimal point
[…
That's sensible advice, in a way, because B7 is in 8859-1 and therefore supported in a huge variety of fonts, for practical purposes, the coverage among non-decorative text fonts is pretty near universal.
This probably implies that most people who wish or need to use a raised dot will keep using B7. And that’s fine for most purposes.
A new character would *allow* people to use raised dot, for which fonts could contain suitable renderings that are independent of the demands of B7 (especially due to its intended primary use as middle dot in some languages). This would mostly be relevant to accurate coding of old documents rather than to everyday needs of British writers.
According to “A history of mathematical notations” by Florian Cajori, paragraph 286, the vertical position of the dot used as decimal separator varied a lot in the 19th century. It varied from just a little above the baseline up to the x-height and above, even to the top of lining figures! I would expect that 20th century typography had similar variation.
Of course, Unicode cannot encode all the possible vertical positions (and sizes) of a raised dot. Such things would be normal glyph variation, for stylistic or other reasons. The point is that no such variation is realistic for B7.
Yucca
