Discussion Details
| Title: | Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts |
| Submitter: | Maurizio Lana |
| Description: | 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 |
| Date Posted: | 24-Jun-2011 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Computational Linguistics |
| Language Specialty: | None |
| LL Issue: | 22.2647 |
| Posted: | 24-Jun-2011 |
