[Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Sat May 3 23:27:24 EDT 2003


Thank you, Patrick. I think this confirms what I have already understood
from others, and passed on to the font developers at SIL. I would tend to
agree with you that 0027 would in principle have been a better choice than
2019 (and I don't, sorry, don't, see apostrophes in English texts being
converted en masse from 0027 to 2019 quickly); but the Unicode standard has
spoken and its decision is unlikely to be reversed - and it does make things
easier for input software, like the longstanding "smart quote" facility in
Word, which can convert all non-leading apostrophe key strokes from 0027 to
2019 without having to determine whether apostrophe or quote is actually
intended.

Only one concern: it is surely beyond the scope of a font to determine
whether it is being used in a polytonic or monotonic context, so presumably
either a mechanism must be provided for these contexts to be marked, or the
font could be chosen depending on which context was required; i.e. if
someone wanted the tonos to appear vertical, they could choose a font in
which it did, but this font would be unsuitable for polytonic text, and
might even be clearly marked as such e.g. by not having glyphs for the other
accents.

I am glad that Yannis' proposals are still in the works, as some of them
certainly should be approved, although others, the new precomposed
characters he suggests, are superfluous in the light of recent font
technology. Indeed, so is the entire Extended Greek range, as every
character has a canonical decomposition - except for 1FBD, 1FBF, 1FC0 and
1FFE, for which the given compatibility decompositions ought to be
canonical. But meanwhile it has been very useful temporarily, for those of
us who have been using older font technology, that these precomposed
characters are available and supported by some fonts.

By the way, you might like to add Ezra SIL and Gentium to the list on your
website of fonts supporting polytonic Greek.

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: biblical-languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:biblical-
> languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Rourke
> Sent: 03 May 2003 20:46
> To: biblical-languages at lists.ibiblio.org
> Cc: Patrick Rourke
> Subject: [Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis
> 



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