On 9/15/2024 9:21 AM, Andreas Prilop 🇮🇱 via Unicode wrote:
Ivan Panchenko wrote:
There is also the (German) circled Wz
The circled Wz was only used in the old West German Duden.
Since re-unification, only circled R has been used in the unified Duden.
even though the symbol was apparently just a Duden idiosyncrasy
I call it Deutschtümelei.
No matter what you call it, for a universal character encoding you will
have to answer the question whether a symbol used in a seminal
publication needs to be encoded for the sake of being able to correctly
archive it without hacks like using private fonts or images.
The answer to the question rests on issues whether the publication is
important enough to warrant very high fidelity or whether there's a
critical significance to having that symbol over any fallback
representation.
In this case, the "owners" of the work are still around and active, so
that means we don't need to make decisions for them.
But imagine for a moment you were researching "Deutschtümelei" and all
digital archives of those older versions had replaced the "idiosyncratic
symbol" with the semantically equivalent circled R. Is that particular
scholarship scenario interesting enough to warrant adding this as a
historical symbol?
I'm not answering this question, but we are contemplating support for
early mathematical notations, some of them fairly specific to particular
mathematicians or even publishers of their work.
There's no hard lines to be found here, and for edge cases the decisions
can seem arbitrary. But in general, this is a key part in how you
approach any attempt at making decisions for such edge cases.
A./
