Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems.
The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.
"A project to digitize Cistercian manuscripts at Western Michigan University is not requesting
the characters be in Unicode, so this is just an informational document. [...] We recommend the UTC make the following disposition: Notes this document (L2/20-290) but takes no further action."
For something to be added to Unicode, someone actually has to request it and shepherd it through the process.
I was thinking using ZWJ because the staff is always implied by the usage of Cistercian numerals. I was also wondering if we could reuse CISTERCIAN 1-9 for each significant digit rather than having to encode all 4 separately, though at the end of the day it’s only 36 separate code points.
Adding the staff is 37 codepoints versus 36, but I think using ZWJ would at least have each numeral independently renderable so it degrades gracefully. I’m not too sure about how combining characters degrade.
Essentially it boils down to whether you think the staff and the digit flag part of the numeral are independent or not.
Excellent! For a music project of mine I found MusGlyph [1] which is also all about ligatures, like typing ssss for 4 beamed sixteenth notes. There are some ligatures I need that are not in the font, I contacted the author and he encouraged me to add them myself. So now I’m spending quality time with FOSS called FontForge. Also subsetting a ligature-heavy font for the web turns out an interesting challenge. Wrote up my experience here [2]
Surprising there isn't a better way to do it than defining 10000 ligature config lines and 10000 glyphs. I guess dynamic combinations of subglyphs are a Unicode level thing?
Seems like it's only when adding 1 + 4, 6, or 8 in a place value or where one of them is 0. It doesn't seem like it'd ever hold across a carry, but I could be missing something.
Edit: There's actually a few cases with adding 2 as well!
The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.
"A project to digitize Cistercian manuscripts at Western Michigan University is not requesting the characters be in Unicode, so this is just an informational document. [...] We recommend the UTC make the following disposition: Notes this document (L2/20-290) but takes no further action."
For something to be added to Unicode, someone actually has to request it and shepherd it through the process.
Were you thinking
Adding the staff is 37 codepoints versus 36, but I think using ZWJ would at least have each numeral independently renderable so it degrades gracefully. I’m not too sure about how combining characters degrade.
Essentially it boils down to whether you think the staff and the digit flag part of the numeral are independent or not.
[1] https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ [2] https://highperformancewebfonts.com/read/subsetting-and-liga...
There is a compositional approach, used by this font.
OP went with brute force because it's probably a heck of a lot easier up front, lol.
> Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual
I wonder how often - my suspicion would be rarely.
Edit: There's actually a few cases with adding 2 as well!