On 9/6/2015 10:10 PM, Martin J. Dürst
wrote:
Hello Ken, Actually, I would come to the opposite conclusion. I don't see the evidence yet that there is anything that can be unified.
Unlike the dollar sign, for which there was a rich typographical history of alternating designs based on the letter S with various slashes, your research confirms (as do my my own searches) that for symbols based on the letter B, that alternation isn't applied. Just because an S with a single stroke, two strokes, the end of two strokes, and even the ends a single stroke have been interchangeably used for various currencies, the same does not have to be true for any other currency symbol based on stroked letters (except, that we know, because this has been researched, that the S is not alone, but nobdody has demonstrated that it is the case for the B).
This statement would need corroboration. I have failed to find a single counter example in moderately persistent image searches. (The only exception is the effort to substitute U+0243). Whereas for the dollar, the first screenful of images had all the variations on it (except the one with the ends to two strokes). Similar for the Baht (no variation). Second, I extremely strongly doubt that people are making the distinction in handwriting. The 'bath form' of the symbol is much easier to write by hand that the 'bitcoin form', and so most people in handwriting will use the former even for bitcoins. Just try to correctly write the four little strokes of the 'bitcoin form', and you will understand easily. And the question I would ask is whether that is an appropriate argument. In some styles of handwriting the letter "u" looks like "u with macron". This is not an argument to unity the two. I have considerable doubt whether any shortcuts in handwriting will strongly influence the modern rendering of digitally encoded currency symbols. Granted, the full range of alternate glyphs tends to only get established over time. However, as long as the two user groups cannot be demonstrated to cross recognize the other depiction as an ordinary variant of their intended symbol, I would strongly caution against unification. In my experience, the widest variety of symbol depiction is found in advertising and price labels (anywhere where the symbol represents a unit and not a "logo"). That's why I ran searches for "sign", "symbol", "font", "price tag" etc. Bitcoin doesn't have enough usage history to show up with a lot of printed price tags, but the Baht does. I have not been able to find the "websites" that use Baht for bitcoin, but I have been able to find the sites that argue for using U+0243. My argument is essentially that when you claim that two shapes are alternate glyphs of the same character, as opposed to two separate characters, then you'd want the alternation to be common. Because the claim is that most users would recognize both forms as the same symbol. So, for the dollar, we can confirm that quickly with any image search, for Bitcoin/Baht we cannot, and in fact the separate identity appears more plausible. A./ PS: Now, just to make the story more complicated, it's true that occasionally some character has perfectly normal alternate glyph representations that are not always easily recognizable in isolation. Fraktur or scripts shapes of Latin capitals come to mind. In most of these cases, strong context (like all the text being in the same font) allows the reader to make identification anyway. That's something I think not applicable to currency symbols. Unless the variant glyphs can be demonstrated (as the were for S and Y based symbols) we can't simply assume they are there.
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