a character for an unknown character

[William_J_G Overington]

Martin Mueller wrote:

> Is there a Unicode character that says “I represent an alphanumerical character, but I don’t know which”.  This is a very common problem in the transcription of historical texts where you have lacunas. 

I have been reading this thread with interest.

I have produced nine designs for glyphs.

If you so choose, you can assign specific meanings to one, some, or all of them. If you need more than nine designs please say.

Please find attached nine .png files, one glyph design in each file.

The size of each of the images and the names of the files follow the following specification.

http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection.html#images

However the images are not congruently in accordance with those rules as there is a one pixel width transparent surround as the designs were made using filled rectangles upon a theoretical seven row by seven column arrangement of blocks, each block ten pixels by ten pixels. I used the Serif PagePlus X7 desktop publishing program.

The characters are not intended as emoji, I just applied the above specification as it is convenient to make the designs compatible with that specification as far as possible.

I have assigned Private Use Area code points of U+EA60 through to U+EA68 to the glyphs. The specific code point for each glyph is indicated in the file name of the image of that glyph.

I have chosen those code points as the Alt codes for U+EA60 through to U+EA68 are Alt 60000 through to Alt 60008 respectively. My thinking being that if the designs are implemented in fonts that those easy to remember Alt codes might be helpful to someone using the Microsoft WordPad program.

I checked that those code points are not being used in the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.

http://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?cp=EA&if=mufi&table=mufi_char

Readers who so choose are welcome to implement these glyphs in fonts.

The http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection.html#images specification mentions licensing. For the avoidance of doubt these designs are free to share and use.

A Private Use Area solution is not ideal, yet may be helpful in getting things started and could be helpful in establishing usage, which could help in getting the characters implemented into regular Unicode.

I am attaching the images to this email. The nature of the email system is that the order of the images might not be in the order of the code points, yet each image has an indication of the code point within its name so that information should help to resolve any such problem in the transmission of the email attachments.

William Overington

Thursday 22 December 2016

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