Variations and Unifications ?
David Faulks
davidj_faulks at yahoo.ca
Tue Mar 15 22:14:15 CDT 2016
As part of my investigations into astrological symbols, I'm beginning to wonder if glyph variations are justifications for separate encoding of symbols I would have previously considered the same or unifiable with symbols already in Unicode.
For example, the semisquare aspect is usually shown with a glyph that is identical to ∠ (U+2220 ANGLE). However, sometimes it looks like <, or like ∟ (U+221F RIGHT ANGLE). Would this be better encoded as a separate codepoint?
The parallel aspect, similarily, sometimes looks like ∥ (U+2225 PARALLEL TO), but is often shown as // or ⫽ (U+2AFD DOUBLE SOLIDUS OPERATOR). This is not a typographical kludge since astrological fonts often show it this way.
There is also contra-parallel, which sometime is shown like ∦ (U+2226 NOT PARALLEL TO), but has varaint glyphs with slated lines (and the crossbar is often horizontal).
The ‘part of fortune’ is sometimes a circled ×, or sometimes a circled +.
Would it be better to have dedicated characters than to assume unifications in these cases?
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