Re: Motion P1788/M0034.01 Notation:NO
Hi,
On 2012-06-09 04:45:45 -0400, Michel Hack wrote:
> Vincent Lef?vre wrote, replying to Alan Eliasen:
> > > you can manage, with more research, to compose a Unicode |R character
> > > with overline, such as by the sequence U+211D U+0305, to make |Rbar,
> > > it is questionable if it will survive cutting-and-pasting, or even if
> > > its display will be visible and distinguishable.
> >
> > No problems on my side, except that it is not very visible due to the
> > small font I use. In any case, the context should help. Copy-paste
> > works too.
>
> These fancy symbols belong in a typeset document, not in e-mail or
> text-based listserver-distributed material. It turns out that cut&paste
> may be essential. Even when I transferred the post to my Notes account
> on a Windows machine the characters displayed as open boxes. I had to
> cut&paste into Notepad to get a clue (using a magnifying glass), or into
> Word at 200% to see what it really was. And even then the bar was not
> the overbar it was supposed to be, it lay on the side. Can Unicode
> express an overstrike? Typesetting programs can.
Yes, Unicode has combining characters, e.g. U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE.
You just need to use U+0305 after the character you want to overline.
The application just needs to support combining characters. Under
GNU/Linux (according to tests in Debian), xterm, rxvt, emacs and
screen 4.00 are OK, but not gnome-terminal and screen 4.01.
> Another problem with such characters is survivability. When that post
> was forwarded back to me from my Notes account, the distinction between
> the two funny characters (the |R and the bar) had been wiped out; both
> were represented by a catch-all funny-character symbol.
Well, that's not the only problem with your mail system. Your messages
don't have MIME headers, so that your non-ASCII characters appear here
as question marks. Moreover your mail system breaks threading, and this
makes discussions a bit difficult to follow.
> As you can see I made up my own translations, as I've been doing for
> other symbols already.
>
> I'm actually sinning too, by assuming everybody can read the Latin1
> extended character set that includes European-language accents and
> diacritics, as in Vincent's last name. Sometimes this is reflected
> back to me correctly, sometimes it's been translated to UTF8 (which
> I can translate back in this case), and I'm not sure how others see
> it. (I type "Lefe\`vre" to get "Lef?vre.)
Here with a question mark due to the lack of MIME headers and charset
declaration.
Regards,
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)