On 8/13/2016 2:47 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
PDF is a presentation format. If the editorial committee sets character names in lowercase "under the hood" so that they will end up looking good in Minion smallcaps in the PDF file, and a user subsequently scrapes the PDF file for content, it doesn't mean there's anything formal or normative about setting character names in lowercase.
Character names, when presented in the Unicode character database are uppercase. The general approach by Unicode is to define property names and values so that case distinctions are not needed to unambiguously resolve identifiers (same for space and most hyphens). That means, the presentation can be flexibly adapted to the style of the document (e.g. the Core Specification has a different style than other documents), yet still retain unambiguous identification of the character.
I believe that small-caps generally looks nice and distinctive. For HTML the way to do this is with a CSS style that allows the underlying text representation to be uppercase while showing lowercase small-cap letters. Marcel, I believe, gave some example, although something like this was used as early as Unicode 5.0 for the UAXs, when we printed them as part of the book.
For plain text, all caps is the easiest way to make the character name stick out and prevent misinterpretation of it as part of the surrounding text. The question becomes then, how much of the character name to show and in which order.
I'm personally partial to U+nnnn (x) CHARACTER NAME. In some cases, this requires some edits to make the text flow, but it has the advantage of being unambiguous, and something that works well for characters of all scripts and categories, including marks and punctuation. In some instances U+nnnn (x) transliterated name works well. I like the use of ( ) instead of " " (curly or not) because the latter is hopeless in showing any combining marks above (the get lost among the "").
However, notations like x (U+nnnn) work pretty well, also, especially when all the "x" are from a distinct-looking script. The same goes for x CHARACTER NAME (U+nnnn). In many cases, there really isn't a need to quote the glyph, and not doing so, can reduce clutter.
In short, this isn't a one-size fits all kind of situation. A./
