At 11:12 PM 3/10/03 -0800, MDL wrote: [much good material now in my archive]
I didn't know there was a dispute over the Latin representation of Arabic (or Hawaiian) characters, probably because my typographical experience is drawn from the 1970s, when I worked in a print shop with Linotype. Every special character was separately set, and so characters were re-used -- transliteration of the ayn is a heritage of that. Even today, it doesn't seem terribly irrational, since transliteration is a process of rendering into the native characters of another system. The 'half ring' might be Unicode, but that's not native to the system. I can't, in fact, think of an example where a non-native character has been used, at least until very recent years. Certain special-purpose characters (math symbols, pronunciation symbols, etc.) were always separate fonts that were also quite expensive, requiring hours of hand-setting (and backwards proofreading of *those* was loathed -- anybody here have to proofread in the metal days?). I just dug out my old U.S. Government Printing Office manual ca. 1970, and it contains separate alphabets as needed (at the time, only Greek and Cyrillic) and what it considered special symbols (math symbols and text decorations). (With respect to another thread, every USGPO set also contained at least separate hyphen, minus sign, en dash and em dash, but some contained a few other dash-like versions.) So I like the move toward accurate symbols, though I still wonder how a language that is transliterated is visually meaningful when transliterated into symbols that aren't among the native characters into which it's being transliterated. Interesting discussion, and I appreciate being brought up-to-date on this. In looking at the Unicode musical symbol pages, I notice a heck of a lot of attention paid to old symbols, including chant, and hardly any of the extensive set collected by Karkoschka over 30 years ago being included, much less those found in Texier's set. Not exactly "uni"! Or is this set extensible? Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
