This doesn’t mean that they should be used. Still, the Roman numerals exist as compatibility characters, because (as I said before) they are required for interoperability with certain legacy standards. (leaving that to a different level of a storage format), and that it doesn’t distinguish between characters that look the same based on semantic differences (e.g., no two different h characters for the silent h in hour and the pronounced h in hero, because they are written the same). Their existence does, however, clash with two main principles of Unicode: that it is a plain text format that doesn’t care about rich text features such as font selection, character positioning such as kerning, etc. Nobody did claim that they were deprecated, nor that they were going to be removed (which is actually impossible for any character, because Unicode has very strict stability policies). And those characters are not deprecated: They exist permanently in the specification What I want to know is precisely that veredict.
Yes, I mentioned that I’m aware of the stance of the Unicode Consortium (…). It’s a shame that they not provide a reasoning for it, so it can be discussed beyond the authority point.īut other than that, I don’t see why wouldn’t we encourage the use of a semantically and stylistically better option (of course, that Picard could convert those character to ASCII if that option is marked would be important in this). Of course, the stance of the Unicode Consortium is a big point to consider. My personal opinion is that they would be an improvement, for the reasons that I have mentioned and I have not seen a reason not to consider them as such (other that they are deprecated, which they are not). If I had to rephrase my question, it would be: If I made such changes, will they be seen as an improvement to the database? Will it depend on the personal preference of those who see and vote on the edit, or will we have a note in the styleguide to quickly resolve the matter? Furthermore, in various cases this is easly discernible by selecting them (it will be obvious wether they are two I or one Ⅱ). Yet, it is recommended to do this changes if one is able to. Regarding to the difficulty in the edit process: This can be said of various similar cases, such as the hyphen (-,‐), the non-breaking space (for French punctuation), or even the endash. What I want to know is precisely that veredict.Īnd those characters are not deprecated: They exist permanently in the specification and have at least one recomended, current use by the Unicode Consortium (to keep the glyph in one row in vertical text), not to mention they are supported for the mayority of unicode fonts. Yes, I mentioned that I’m aware of the stance of the Unicode Consortium, and if the verdict of the community is to follow that recommendation, then so be it. I don’t know whether the server accept this substitution automatically (as it does for capitalization or " → “, etc), but an official stance in favor would mean it should or one against, would mean to add a clarification note in the styleguide, I suppouse.
They can be correctly ordered alphabetically (e.g.: Ⅴ appears before Ⅸ, whereas IX appears before V). They are displayed more consistently and with better typographic handling (kerning, height (taller than samall‐caps, shorter than capital letters, mostly)) by fonts that support them (of which are plenty). They are logically considered numerical values, and as so, machines can understand unequivocally their meaning and value. I do see various advantages in using them, and since they can be handled the same as other unicode characters (using search equivalents, and converted using the “Convert Unicode punctuation characters to ASCII” in Picard), no disadvantages. But it is fact that has to be considered. I fail to see the reasoning behind that recomendation, and none is provided by them.
I’m aware that the Unicode Consortium discourages the use of this table stating that “For most purposes, it is preferable to compose the Roman numerals from sequences of the appropriate Latin letters”. I was wondering If this topic has been discussed (I couldn’t find anything).
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