2012/5/23 Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentz...@acssoft.de>: > Am Mittwoch, 23. Mai 2012 um 20:01 schrieb Jukka K. Korpela: > > JKK> 2012-05-23 20:40, Doug Ewell wrote: >>> Note also that the German mark was pretty much always just "DM" > > JKK> Well, looking at my stamp collection, I can see old German stamps with > JKK> symbols that look like script-style “m” (with the height of digits) and > JKK> script-style “M”. > > The Deutsche Mark (DM, ISO 4217: DEM) was introduced 1948. > The Mark sign you noted was used before for the German currencies > called "Mark" from 1871 on. It was present on German typewriters in that > era. > Fortunately, this sign is already encoded (U+2133 SCRIPT CAPITAL M).
You forget the case of the script "lowercase" m. In fact what I've seen is not really lowercase, it's using the same height as the digits, and the lowercase letter is curled on the right side, and slightly italicized, sometimes with the last leg going a bit below the base line before returning to it in a curve This glyph style is one accepted alternate form for the cursive capital M, and may be it could be encoded as a variant of the existing SCRIPT CAPITAL M which, in that case, would still be associable to the old Mark (before 1948). This glyph has other uses as well in normal texts, even outside of Germany, but for this case, an alternate cursive font with an italic style would preferably be used, for rendering texts encoded with the standard Latin letters, where it would be then encoded as LATIN CAPITAL M. [side note] For example I've seen this glyph used in French schools, years ago!, as it is simpler to draw correctly by early learners of the script. This may no longer be the case now in many schools, because the cursive style is no longer the primary form of the Latin script that is being taught : Children are more used to a non linear form with simplified sans-serif Swiss designs (like Arial/Helvetica, but wider, more like Verdana) and more straight strokes, and regular weights, those you see for example in toys sold for children. Many children now leave the school without ever having been taught the cursive style and have difficulties now to read texts in books and papers printed using fonts with serifs and variable stroke weights because they pass directly to the simplified sans-serif letter forms seen in web browsers and on smartphones... And even the italic style of the same same-serif font family is difficult for them to decipher, only the bold style variant is really accessible for them because they'e seen it since the early infancy ! [/side note]