Every character has a story: U+213a (rotated Q) (2005)

栏目: IT技术 · 发布时间: 5年前

内容简介:This article will be the first in an occasional recurring series of articles that point out little-known historical character stories in Unicode.The character in question is U+213a, ROTATED CAPITAL Q. It is a Capital Q turned 90° counter-clockwise. It is e

This article will be the first in an occasional recurring series of articles that point out little-known historical character stories in Unicode.

The character in question is U+213a, ROTATED CAPITAL Q. It is a Capital Q turned 90° counter-clockwise. It is encoded in theLetterlike Symbols block in Unicode, and according to the Unicode annotation, it is "a binding signature mark."

I am sure I am not the only one who had no flipping clue what that means.

Thankfully, Ken Whistler provided the explanation.

The proximate cause for the encoding of this character was the need to provide roundtrip mapping for encoded characters in ISO 5426-2:1996, Information and documentation -- Extension of the Latin alphabet coded character set for bibliographic information interchange -- Part 2: Latin characters used in minor European languages and obsolete typography.

That standard has four characters annotated as "Used as a binding signature mark":

  • 0x32 REFERENCE MARK
  • 0x34 MALTESE CROSS
  • 0x36 RIGHTWARDS LEAF ARROW
  • 0x37 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SIDEWAYS Q

The first three were unified with the existing Unicode characters:

  • U+203B REFERENCE MARK
  • U+2720 MALTESE CROSS
  • U+2767 ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET (aka "hedera" or "ivy leaf")

The sideways Q could not be unified with any existing character, and so was encoded as a new character.

Binding signature marks are marks placed by publishers on the edges of signatures (aka "gatherings" -- printed and folded sheets in units of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 pages) for book binding.

There are a rather large number of these, which could be considered publisher logos, in a way, except that many of them make use of odd symbols available in their printers' type sets.

There is no particular need to go out and catalog more of them and encode them as characters, because of their peculiar usage not part of regular text.

However, the ROTATED CAPITAL Q got in as part of the mapping project to help get ISO TC46 out of the business of developing and maintaining character encoding standards independently of the ongoing work in ISO JTC1/SC2/WG2 to develop ISO/IEC 10646.

There you have it -- the character was encoded for compatibility with another standard that we wanted to help move on to other things and not keep encoding characters independent of Unicode. A necessary tax that we sometimes have to pay for having a universal character encoding standard.

This post brought to you by " ℺"

(U+213a, a.k.a. ROTATED CAPITAL Q)

(You may not be able to see this character unless you have a font like Code2000 that contains it)

以上就是本文的全部内容,希望对大家的学习有所帮助,也希望大家多多支持 码农网

查看所有标签

猜你喜欢:

本站部分资源来源于网络,本站转载出于传递更多信息之目的,版权归原作者或者来源机构所有,如转载稿涉及版权问题,请联系我们

UNIX网络编程

UNIX网络编程

史蒂文斯、芬纳、鲁道夫 / 杨继张 / 清华大学出版社 / 2006-1 / 98.00元

《UNIX网络编程》(第1卷)(套接口API第3版)第1版和第2版由已故UNIX网络专家W. Richard Stevens博士独自编写。《UNIX网络编程》(第1卷)(套接口API第3版)是3版,由世界著名网络专家Bill Fenner和Andrew M. Rudoff执笔,根据近几年网络技术的发展,对上一版进行全面修订,增添了IPv6的更新过的信息、SCTP协议和密钥管理套接口的内容,删除了X......一起来看看 《UNIX网络编程》 这本书的介绍吧!

HTML 压缩/解压工具
HTML 压缩/解压工具

在线压缩/解压 HTML 代码

RGB CMYK 转换工具
RGB CMYK 转换工具

RGB CMYK 互转工具

HEX HSV 转换工具
HEX HSV 转换工具

HEX HSV 互换工具