Am Mittwoch, 6. Juni 2012 um 09:55 schrieb Szelp, A. Sz.: SAS> Michael wrote: SAS> "As I say, stretched x is in a family of other x's with one or two SAS> long feet, which may have rings or hooks on the end of them. But its SAS> weight is clearly x-like -- by design. Where Teuthonista texts SAS> occasionally used a "proper" Greek chi it is because of typographic SAS> deficiency."
I second this. The real lower case Latin chi (used for IPA and for some North American Indigenous orthographies) will show curves on the upper left and lower right terminations like its uppercase counterpart, which has to show such in any case to be distinguishable from an uppercase Latin X. The stretched x will look just like its name says, as it (as Michael said) has to be in line with other related characters. The fact that the italic forms in some fonts may look similar is no argument for an unification, otherwise U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F and U+0192 LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK had to be regarded as being the same letter also. It is also very likely that the Latin chi and the stretched x will be used in the same environment. Both are phonetic letters, and are likely to occur in the same texts especially when somebody presents their transcription of Teuthonista sources into IPA. This means that fonts designed for dialectology, containing Teuthonista characters, usually will contain IPA characters also. Thus, if the stretched x were unified with the chi, the design of the stretched x would be fixed to the chi design, preventing it from being designed in line with the other x forms (or, even worse, invite the designer to make the other x forms inappropriately "chi-like"). SAS> ... but it's Michael himself who's recognized that SAS> "Teuthonista suffers from a good deal of extraordinarily bad SAS> typography" ... This, however, is no excuse for continuing such bad typography into a bad encoding which would carve in stone such a bad typography forever. - Karl