Patrick T. Rourke wrote:
> Alpha acute is a different character from alpha grave, because it has a
> different semantic meaning (the tone is different, not simply the
> position as is the case with e.g. sigma terminal), it is not merely a
> different glyph.
<snip/>
> Some of the "characters"
> are markup and should not be assigned Unicode code points. Some have
> semantic differences from existing characters which the Unicode
> Consortium (rightly or wrongly) considers insignificant (take e.g. the
> acrophonic numerals with the same letterforms as letters: is it really
> fair to expect those to be encoded differently when the original users
> may have considered them to be the same characters?). Some are very
> rare characters which may be variants of existing characters and would
> be best represented with the existing character and distinguishing
> markup. And some are idiosyncratic characters which perhaps should not
> be encoded at all.
I'd only disagree with your last statement, surely it is the
idiosyncratic characters which are most in need of markup?
Those interested in the markup of characters and XML maybe be
interested in the significantly revised draft chapters on 'Languages
and Character Sets' http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/CH.html and
'Representation of non-standard characters and glyphs'
http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/WD.html being prepared for our next
release of the TEI guidelines. If these don't allow you to do what
you need generally, especially in representing betacode in a
combination of markup and Unicode, then I'd strongly suggest raising
it on TEI-L or submitting a 'feature request' on the sourceforge site.
(tei.sourceforge.net) I only mention it because there have been a
significant number of changes in this area from the P4 version of the
guidelines.
-James
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Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
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