Phil Blair wrote as follows. quote
2. The Jesuits and other missionaries of the Age of Exploration worked and published intensively in then-exotic languages on four continents. There are scholars and groups of scholars now attempting to look systematically at that body of work. I suspect that there is no stange character that could turn up in a Maya text from that period that wouldn't also turn up in texts about South American, Asian, or African languages, and when we do deal with these characters it would be best to do it in a systematic and comprehensive way. They will all reflect a common origin in the missionary training institutions of Europe. end quote That research sounds fascinating. Do you have any details of who is doing the research please? I am not a linguist yet do have a great interest in the typographical aspects of the way special characters were printed by the early printers. I also have an interest in history so such a project would be doubly interesting for me. I suggest that a good idea would be if those of us who are interested could research the typography and printing aspects and that a Private Use Area encoding could be made of the special characters. Then various craft fontmakers might all use the same encoding and start to produce fonts which contain the characters. For example, as a first suggestion, if U+E400 and upwards were used for that purpose, would that be a suitable choice for the various font makers who might like to consider adding such characters into their existing fonts? The long term goal would be to get the characters promoted into regular Unicode, yet using the Private Use Area would allow documents to be encoded rather sooner than if one needs to wait for encoding into regular Unicode and any such documents encoded could be converted by an automated process at a later date. Indeed, using the Private Use Area in this manner and having font availability might help the research. My suggestion of U+E400 is as a basis for discussion: does anyone happen to know if the researchers have already started a Private Use Area encoding please as that possibility needs to be checked before starting a new encoding? Does anyone happen to know if any of the metal fonts, or matrices, of such characters survive from the sixteenth century please? From the general history of printing there does seem to be a great lack of surviving early printing type, which has always seemed strange to me, as well as unfortunate. William Overington 28 March 2003
