Well, sure; some languages work better with some fonts. There's nothing
wrong with saying that 02BC might look the same as 2019... but it's
nice, when writing Hawaiian (or Klingon for that matter) to use a bigger
glyph. That's why they pay typesetters the big bucks (you wish): to make
things look good on the page.
I recall in early Volapük, ʼ was a letter (presumably 02BC), with value
/h/. And the "capital" ʼ was the same, except bolder: see
https://archive.org/details/cu31924027111453/page/n11 (entry 4, on the
left-hand page).
~mark
On 1/27/19 12:23 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
On 1/26/2019 6:25 PM, Michael Everson via Unicode wrote:
the 02BC’s need to be bigger or the text can’t be read easily. In our
work we found that a vertical height of 140% bigger than the quotation
mark improved legibility hugely. Fine typography asks for some other
alterations to the glyph, but those are cosmetic.
If the recommended glyph for 02BC were to be changed, it would in no case
impact adversely on scientific linguistics texts. It would just make the mark a
bit bigger. But for practical use in Polynesian languages where the character
has to be found alongside the quotation marks, a glyph distinction must be made
between this and punctuation.
It somehow seems to me that an evolution of the glyph shape of 02BC in
a direction of increased distinction from U+2019 is something that
Unicode has indeed made possible by a separate encoding. However, that
evolution is a matter of ALL the language communities that use U+02BC
as part of their orthography, and definitely NOT something were
Unicode can be permitted to take a lead. Unicode does not *recommend*
glyphs for letters.
However, as a publisher, you are of course free to experiment and to
see whether your style becomes popular.
There is a concern though, that your choice may appeal only to some
languages that use this code point and not become universally accepted.
A./
