On Wed, 21 Dec 2016 02:29:59 +0000 Martin Mueller <[email protected]> wrote:
> I’m new to this list. Please excuse my technical incompetence. > Is there a Unicode character that says “I represent an alphanumerical > character, but I don’t know which”. This is a very common problem in > the transcription of historical texts where you have lacunas. Often, > the extent of the lacuna is known, and the alphabet is known as well. U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER says that one can't represent (or interpret) the specified character as Unicode. U+3013 GETA MARK says the character isn't encoded, and I suspect implies not being available as a usable PUA character. U+0359 COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW can mean that we have to take someone's word for what the character is - he claimed he knew, but we can't see the evidence. (That is the meaning given when the character was added, but it can have other meanings - I've seen a Thai dictionary use it as a nukta.) The concept here is 'no-one in communication knows for sure what the character is'. The usual notation for this is diagonal shading, for which CSS mark-up repeating-linear-gradient is now available. Graphically, the best character, which may not be considered completely appropriate, is U+26C6 RAIN Having a general class of symbol_other, just like U+3013, it should have the appropriate Unicode properties. I'm just not sure that one can justify it as 'something washed the character out' -:) Script should only matter if there is a known combining character, in which case we are heading for the territory of partial damage marks, which generally feel like mark-up. If we add a bespoke character, it might belong in a punctuation block, just as u+3013 does. It represents a gap, like SPACE, but this time, generally a hole in the medium of the text. Richard.
