Re: A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 11/1/2018 12:33 AM, Janusz S. Bień via Unicode wrote: On Wed, Oct 31 2018 at 12:14 -0700, Ken Whistler via Unicode wrote: On 10/31/2018 11:27 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote: but we don't have an agreement that reproducing all variations in manuscripts is in scope. In fact, I would say that in the UTC, at least, we have an agreement that that clearly is out of scope! Trying to represent all aspects of text in manuscripts, including handwriting conventions, as plain text is hopeless. There is no principled line to draw there before you get into arbitrary calligraphic conventions. Your statements are perfect examples of "attacking a straw man": Perhaps you are joking? Not sure which of us you were suggesting as the jokester here. I don't think it's a joke to recognize that there is a continuum here and that there is no line that can be drawn which is based on straightforward principles. This is a pattern that keeps surfacing the deeper you look at character coding questions. Well, there used to be something of a joke, and it went like this: when the first volume containing the Unicode Standard was printed, someone noted that it contained not one statement of principles, but three. And each of them listed a different number of them. Common to all of them was the pattern that it was impossible to satisfy all of the principles simultaneously. They were always in tension with each other, meaning that it was necessary to weigh on a case-by-case basis which ones to prioritize. This is no accident: it simply reflects the nature of the beast. Some encoding decisions are blindingly obvious, but beyond them, things rather quickly become a matter of judgment and if you go much further, you eventually reach a point, where such judgments become little more than a stab in the dark. Some may not even make useful precedents. That's a good place to stop, because beyond that you get into extreme territory. Sometimes, it may be useful for plain text to be extended so as to facilitate a 90% solution to something, math for example. That kind of thing requires systematic analysis; looking at a single example in isolation is not enough. It also requires buy-in from an established user community, in the case of math that included mathematical societies and scientific publishers. That's the kind of thin needed to help understand how to make encoding decisions in borderline cases, and to ensure that the dividing line, while essentially still arbitrary, sits comfortably on the good side, because everyone agrees on which remaining 10% are to be out of scope. In this case, there is no such framework that could help establish pragmatic boundaries dividing the truly useful from the merely fanciful. A./