Chris Hopkins wrote as follows. quote
I am a new list member interested in implementing archaic, classical and Hellenistic Greek glyphs in a Unicode font. My initial questions will be focused on handling multiple alternate glyphs for each character, and how to organize a font with several thousand Hellenistic monograms. Is this the appropriate discussion list? If not, I'd appreciate a pointer. end quote This looks an interesting discussion and I hope that you will ask your questions in this forum. The matter of multiple alternate glyphs for each character seems at first a font issue, and it is partly a font issue, yet it is also a Unicode issue once one starts trying to encode a document which is intended to apply those glyphs in some controlled selection manner. For example, are you going to have some texts such as "Author A uses the symbol X for beta whereas author B uses the symbol Y for beta." where X and Y are just two of the "multiple alternate glyphs" which you mentioned? What please is a Hellenistic monogram? I am wondering whether this is going to be a good application of the Private Use Area, either on a permanent basis or on a temporary basis pending making a formal encoding application. In either case, reading about the Private Use Area in Chapter 13 of the Unicode specification available from the http://www.unicode.org webspace may prove interesting. William Overington 4 April 2003
