A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

[Janusz S. Bień via Unicode]

On Fri, Nov 02 2018 at  5:09 -0700, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:

[...]

> To transcribe the postcard would mean selecting the characters
> appropriate for the printed equivalent of the text.

You seem to make implicit assumptions which are not necessarily
true. For me to transcribe the postcard would mean to answer the needs
of the intended transcription users.

> If the printed form had a standard way of superscripting letters with
> a decoration below when used for abbreviations, then, and only then
> would we start discussing whether this decoration needs to be encoded,
> or whether it is something a font can supply as part of rendering the
> (sequence of) superscripted letters. (Perhaps with the aid of markup
> identifying the sequence as abbreviation).

As I wrote already some time ago on the list, the alternative "encoding
or using a specialized font" is wrong. These days texts are encoding for
processing (in particular searching), rendering is just a kind of
side-effect.

On the other hand, whom do you mean by "we" and what do you mean by
"encoding"? If I guess correctly what do you mean by these words then
you are discussing an issue which was never raised by anybody (if I'm
wrong, please quote the relevant post). Again is not clear for me whom
you want to convince or inform.

> All else is just applying visual hacks

I don't mind hacks if they are useful and serve the intended purpose,
even if they are visual :-)

> to simulate a specific appearance,

As I said above, the appearance is not necessarily of primary
importance.

> at the possible cost of obscuring the contents.

It's for the users of the transcription to decide what is obscuring the
text and what, to the contrary, makes the transcription more readable
and useful.

Best regards

Janusz

-- 
             ,   
Janusz S. Bien
emeryt (emeritus)
https://sites.google.com/view/jsbien