22.2647, Disc: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts

[linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG]

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-2647. Fri Jun 24 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.2647, Disc: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssa at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm.

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 20-Jun-2011
From: Maurizio Lana [m.lana at lett.unipmn.it]
Subject: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:05:00
From: Maurizio Lana [m.lana at lett.unipmn.it]
Subject: Missing Characters and Glyphs in Unicode Fonts

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=22-2647.html&submissionid=4524096&topicid=5&msgnumber=1
  


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







-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-22-2647	
----------------------------------------------------------