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LINGUIST List 22.2647

Fri Jun 24 2011

Disc: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts

Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.org>

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        1.     Maurizio Lana , Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts
Message 1: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts
Date: 20-Jun-2011
From: Maurizio Lana <m.lanalett.unipmn.it>
Subject: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts
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Dear colleagues,

I would like to get your advice about a matter regarding characters,
glyphs, fonts and Unicode.

In printed late-Latin texts symbols do appear representing measurement
units (you can see a list of them at
http://www.tulliana.eu/documenti/measure%20units.doc). The problem is that
- as far as I know - no single font contains all of those characters. Some
of them are found in Cardo by D. Perry, some other in Alphabetum by J.J.
Marcos, some other elsewhere, and some of them do not appear in any font I
know.

So some questions arise about:
1) How do we represent those 'signs' in a digital text?
2) What should be done in order to get the glyph corresponding to the
missing characters?
3) What should be done in order to have 1 single font containing all those
symbols? (Creating an ad-hoc font? Expanding one of the existing fonts?)
4) What to do in order to have Unicode-compliant character codes for the
now non-existent characters?

The solution of getting the missing characters from many different fonts is
not viable as it requires that the scholar interested to those texts loads
many different fonts in order use 1 or 2 or 5 characters from each of them.

With many thanks to everyone!
Maurizio


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
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