Subject: TLG and Beta code
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 09:49:20 +0100
David,
I am glad to see this much progress, yet, as I noticed after posting,
the zero symbol is actually missing in
beta code, so your Beta code -Unicode equivalences would not have it.
I think it is fair to say that the TLG have avoided the parts of
mathematical texts where the symbol is common, as in the various
tables in Ptolemy's Almagest (where all the tables are omitted by
TLG). This symbol is in reality more common than the rarities listed
in quickbeta. In the editions I am involved with we use U+14D, o,
which is near enough I suppose.
I count 368 instances of #130, the TLG entity for Greek zero, in the
text of the Almagest the TLG has, and a further 543 in Pappus'
commentary on the Almagest, 80 in Theon's commentary, and well over a
thousand in Byzantine astronomers; so rumours of its absence in Beta
code are exaggerated. :-) The TLG didn't actually avoid the tables (at
least not those integrated into the text), though the current markup of
the tables is somewhat dated.
Of course, the scholarly markup of texts in general raises the question
of when a glyph does need a Unicode codepoint, and when it is merely a
variant of something else, or beyond the scope of plaintext. The
listing of Beta escapes includes much that is either idiosyncratic or
a variant of something else; the TLG has traditionally erred on the
side of caution in including Beta escapes (equivalent to XML entities),
but the requirements for TLG markup are not necessarily the same for
inclusion in Unicode.
The equivalent glyph the TLG has posted for #130 is omicron, though of
course the print edition used for the Almagest has its Greek zero
slightly different (it's closer to an Goudy-style Arabic zero, from
memory.) Whether it merits its own codepoint, or is merely a glyph
variant of U+0030 Digit Zero, is probably a debate for another time and
place. What to do with such "one-off" glyphs the kind of issue the
Text Encoding Initiative is having to deal with, though.
One might argue against omicron or o-macron for Greek Zero on the
grounds that this isn't really a character but a digit; but then these
texts use letters for digits anyway. So I don't see a clear rationale
for one way or the other. However, I think the numerical diacritic for
the zero should be the same as for other Greek letters, and it should
be U+0305 Combining Overline rather than U+0304 Combining Macron.
|||
"Assuming, for whatever reasons, that neither scholar presented the
evidence properly, then there remains a body of evidence you have not
yet destroyed because it has never been presented." --- Harold Fleming
|NickNicholas|Dept.French&ItalianStudies|UniversityOfMelbourne|Australia
|
| ***@unimelb.edu.au http://www.opoudjis.net
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