Aw: Re: On the lack of a SQUARE TB glyph

[Marius Spix via Unicode]

What about the idea to provide half-width forms for the SI prefixes and half-width forms for common units? For example, you could encode petaohm as HALFWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER CAPITAL P + HALF WIDTH GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA, gigacalories as HALFWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G + HALF WIDTH LATIN SMALL CAL TRIGRAPH and millimol as HALFWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER M +  HALF WIDTH LATIN SMALL MOL TRIGRAPH.

 

Marius Spix

 

Gesendet: Montag, 30. September 2019 um 10:32 Uhr
Von: "Asmus Freytag via Unicode" <unicode@unicode.org>
An: unicode@unicode.org
Betreff: Re: On the lack of a SQUARE TB glyph

On 9/30/2019 1:01 AM, Andre Schappo via Unicode wrote:

On Sep 27, 1 Reiwa, at 08:17, Julian Bradfield via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

Or one could allow IDS to have leaf components that are any
characters, not just ideographic characters, and then one could have
all sorts of fun.

I do like this idea.

Note: This is a modified repost as I previously forgot to credit Julian as the originator

André Schappo

And to keep my previous reply in context: I think the "all sorts of fun" would be the wrong reason to do things. However, things like squared abbreviations and squared kana words all occur in the context of typesetting text containing ideographs. Therefore, extending the IDS slightly, so that it can cover those use cases, would make a certain amount of sense. While the result being composed (or "described") wouldn't be an actual Han ideograph, it would nevertheless function like one typographically.

That makes that suggestion a rather appropriate alternative for things like *SQUARE TB.

The kinds of fonts that might have a mapping from some IDS to a single glyph might also have glyphs that correspond to popular squared abbreviations.

And the way the components are stacked is at least broadly similar to (or better a subset of) the ways ideographic components can be stacked. On might start out by disallowing things like the surround operators in favor of simply doing things like "two up" and "side by side" for starters.

In other words, not "all sorts of fun" but something targeted to precisely needed for the extension of the frozen subset of abbreviations so that they can occur in contexts that do not allow full markup languages without having to be precomposed.

A./