Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)

On Friday, March 11, 2005, at 10:16 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 12 Mar 2005, at 6.33 am, Ray Brown wrote:
>
>> If you read my mail properly, you will see that - tho originally I had
>> forgotten (senior moment) the 'incomplete D' version - what I was
>> complaining about is a form that resembles *lower case h*, i.e. it has
>> an
>> *ascender*.  No other uppercase letter has an ascender.
>
> You never said anything about it having an ascender in your original
> mail,
But lower case _h_ does have an ascender   :)

> so I just interpreted it as meaning the 'incomplete D' form
> (which I'm hoping is synonymous with 'like a large eng').
Yep - that's what I would understand.

> I've never
> seen a form other than large eng and hooked N,
Nor had I, till I started looking at the fonts on my Mac  ;)

> so I didn't realise you
> could be talking about anything else! I think it's likely that your
> system is misconfigured somehow, but knowing computers you'll probably
> never work it out...
...and I'm supposed to be a computer scientist! but don't blame the poor
computers - it's the humans who write the software who are the problem.
IMHO there is far too much poorly written software about - but we'd better
not pursue that thread on this list   :)

[snip]
>> Absolutely correct. So would it not be sensible in exactly the same
>> way to
>> allow for the two different well-esablished traditions for uppercase
>> eng?
>
> I'm not sure...
[snip]
> Clearly the Unicode consortium have some principles they want to
> follow...
Exactly. What I mean is that U+0067 can be defined as either of the
traditional lowercase _g_ symbols, according to font. But U+0261 is named
as 'Latin small letter script g' and is specifically the handwritten one
that we were all taught in school long years ago, with just a simple
descender; and U+210A which Unicode names as 'script small g' is
specifically the form with two loops that is common in printed texts.

Why, if U+0148 may be defined as either of the established upercase eng
forms, according to font, is it not possible in a similar way to |g|, to
have two symbols allotted each to a specific form when, for some reason, a
person wishes to be precise?

Indeed, I keep hoping that someone, more well acquainted with Unicode,
will tell ne there are two such symbols  :)
========================================================

On Saturday, March 12, 2005, at 07:59 , Steg Belsky wrote:

> On Mar 11, 2005, at 9:33 PM, Ray Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> - it has an ascender and does not give the appearance of an uppercase
>> letter.
>> - it is actually _smaller_ than the lowercase letter and appears
>> written
>> superscript.
>
> That's so weird...  on my mac, i haven't noticed any capital engs
> coming out as superscript |h|s,
Maybe there is some configuration problem on mine, as Tristan suggested.

> and i assume i would notice since i use
> those superscript |h|s to transliterate silent |h|s in Hebrew!
> Some of your complaints about it though remind me of why i don't like
> the uppercase thorn letter :-P .
Now, uppercase thorn seems to behave for me   :)

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]