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Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals

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Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals

#11

Post by edflsafoiewq »

bikeshaving wrote: post #10

Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems. The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.

My immediate thought was combining characters eg

  934 = CISTERCIAN STAFF + 
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 900 +
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 30 +
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 4
Would require allocating (1 staff) + (9 digits) * (4 places) = 37 code points.

Were you thinking

  934 = CISTERCIAN 900 +
        ZWJ + 
        CISTERCIAN 30 +
        ZWJ +
        CISTERCIAN 4

?

Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals

#12

Post by yorwba »

bikeshaving wrote: post #10

Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems. The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.

From the Script Ad Hoc Group: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21016-script-adhoc-rept.pdf

"A project to digitize Cistercian manuscripts at Western Michigan University is not requesting the characters be in Unicode, so this is just an informational document. [...] We recommend the UTC make the following disposition: Notes this document (L2/20-290) but takes no further action."

For something to be added to Unicode, someone actually has to request it and shepherd it through the process.

Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals

#13

Post by bikeshaving »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #11
bikeshaving wrote: post #10

Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems. The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.

My immediate thought was combining characters eg 934 = CISTERCIAN STAFF + COMBINING CISTERCIAN 900 + COMBINING CISTERCIAN 30 + COMBINING CISTERCIAN 4 Would require allocating (1 staff) + (9 digits) * (4 places) = 37 code points. Were you thinking 934 = CISTERCIAN 900 + ZWJ + CISTERCIAN 30 + ZWJ + CISTERCIAN 4 ?

I was thinking using ZWJ because the staff is always implied by the usage of Cistercian numerals. I was also wondering if we could reuse CISTERCIAN 1-9 for each significant digit rather than having to encode all 4 separately, though at the end of the day it’s only 36 separate code points.

Adding the staff is 37 codepoints versus 36, but I think using ZWJ would at least have each numeral independently renderable so it degrades gracefully. I’m not too sure about how combining characters degrade.

Essentially it boils down to whether you think the staff and the digit flag part of the numeral are independent or not.

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