A sign/abbreviation for "magister"

Marcel Schneider via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Fri Nov 2 11:46:42 CDT 2018


On 02/11/2018 17:20, Janusz S. Bień via Unicode wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, not using MODIFIER LETTER SMALL R to encode the r in "Mʳ" would
make it harder to retrieve the "Magister" abbreviation in a database.
Eg Bing Search having less extended equivalence classes when I tested
it for mathematical preformatted letters, it was able to retrieve them
precisely. Perhaps it still is.

Best regards,

Marcel


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