Re: Latin capital letter Is (Ꝭ)

Michael Everson via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sun Mar 3 08:22:22 CST 2019


Fredrick,

> I sent this query to Michael Everson directly on Feb. 19 but did not hear anything back. I assume that he was too busy to respond, perhaps I even broke some unwritten rule of etiquette, for which I apologize; so I am hoping that someone on the mailing list knows the answer instead.

I’m fairly sure you could have asked your question without this irritating paragraph. 

> I am trying to find examples of the glyph encoded as U+A76C (Ꝭ), the so-called Latin Capital Letter Is. I have found ample proof and examples of its younger brother, the so-called Latin Small Letter Is encoded as U+A76D (ꝭ).

There is no reason to use “so-called”. One is called LATIN CAPITAL LETTER IS, and one is called LATIN SMALL LETTER IS.

> I checked Everson's proposal to encode these letters, and unfortunately found there no proof of the existence of the capital variant.

The encoding allows you to write “sperꝭ” and it allows you to write “SPERꝬ”. To write “SPERꝭ" with the lower-case one would not be good. It is the same with “angꝯ” and “ANGꝮ”. The same with “romanoꝝ” and “ROMANOꝜ”. 

In my view, any writer should be able to choose the casing form of any letter. If you’re typesetting a journal, for instance, and want to use all caps or small caps in your page header, and the title of a chapter or article has such characters in it, it is problematic if the capital form is missing. I don't think it has been advantageous to the standard to balk at adding capital forms. A very few lower-case Latin letters probably can’t admit of a capital, but most of them can, and yet we are stuck wth waiting for someone to find a gap when we could with some reasonable design principles fill the gaps ourselves.

> Is it a dreaded Unicode-ism?

There is no such thing, and casing pairs are a normal part of the Latin script. These abbreviation characters were proposed, accepted, and added because of this structure. 

> How should I handle this in my font?

Draw it as you wish. Most likely it will be the same shape as your lower-case one, adjusted to fit caps height.

> Best,
> Fredrick Brennan
> 




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