From: "Raymond Mercier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: TLG and Beta code Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 09:49:20 +0100
David,
I am glad to see this much progress, yet, as I noticed after posting, the zero symbol is actually missing in
beta code, so your Beta code -Unicode equivalences would not have it. I think it is fair to say that the TLG have avoided the parts of mathematical texts where the symbol is common, as in the various tables in Ptolemy's Almagest (where all the tables are omitted by TLG). This symbol is in reality more common than the rarities listed in quickbeta. In the editions I am involved with we use U+14D, o, which is near enough I suppose.
I count 368 instances of #130, the TLG entity for Greek zero, in the text of the Almagest the TLG has, and a further 543 in Pappus' commentary on the Almagest, 80 in Theon's commentary, and well over a thousand in Byzantine astronomers; so rumours of its absence in Beta code are exaggerated. :-) The TLG didn't actually avoid the tables (at least not those integrated into the text), though the current markup of the tables is somewhat dated.
Of course, the scholarly markup of texts in general raises the question of when a glyph does need a Unicode codepoint, and when it is merely a variant of something else, or beyond the scope of plaintext. The listing of Beta escapes includes much that is either idiosyncratic or a variant of something else; the TLG has traditionally erred on the side of caution in including Beta escapes (equivalent to XML entities), but the requirements for TLG markup are not necessarily the same for inclusion in Unicode.
The equivalent glyph the TLG has posted for #130 is omicron, though of course the print edition used for the Almagest has its Greek zero slightly different (it's closer to an Goudy-style Arabic zero, from memory.) Whether it merits its own codepoint, or is merely a glyph variant of U+0030 Digit Zero, is probably a debate for another time and place. What to do with such "one-off" glyphs the kind of issue the Text Encoding Initiative is having to deal with, though.
One might argue against omicron or o-macron for Greek Zero on the grounds that this isn't really a character but a digit; but then these texts use letters for digits anyway. So I don't see a clear rationale for one way or the other. However, I think the numerical diacritic for the zero should be the same as for other Greek letters, and it should be U+0305 Combining Overline rather than U+0304 Combining Macron.
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