I think CYFI has characters in the PUA for "lost sign" and "damaged sign". Both are shaded squares using different patterns.
On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 3:49 PM, Richard Wordingham < [email protected]> wrote: > 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. > >
