Display of punctus elevatus

[adunning]

At https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_6923, the punctus elevatus character used here (U+2E4E) is not displaying.

I think we'll need to embed this in a webfont, since this is a recent addition to Unicode and most clients will not have a font with it available.

[andrew-morrison]

Finding a font which supports this character (apparently something like an upside-down semi-colon), and is free, and doesn't radically change the look of the rest of the web site, might be difficult.

Maybe instead we should think about adding the gaiji module to our TEI customization. Then it could be defined in a charDecl, with a URL of a graphical representation, and the character itself as a g element. But that means lengthening the documentation, and more things to test and potentially support in the stylesheets.

Or, wait and see if font suppliers start supporting this and other new characters introduced in Unicode 11.0, which was only released in June 2018.

[adunning]

The character is available in Junicode (though at the old codepoint), and it would be fairly easy to embed a single-character webfont using that. Am I correct in thinking that one could then use that font only for U+2E4E without affecting anything else?

[ahankinson]

If you specify fallback fonts then it will use characters from those fonts in order. Our 'font-family' directive for digital bodleian 2 is:

font-family: 'Noto Sans', 'Noto Sans Hebrew', 'Droid Arabic Naskh', 'Noto Sans TC', 'Noto Sans Georgian', 'Noto Sans Ethiopic', 'Noto Sans Armenian', sans-serif;

This picks up on the characters for the different languages in order.

[adunning]

Perfect. Would you, then, be able to create a single-character font that takes U+F161 from Junicode and supplies it at U+2E4E? If not, I imagine I could figure it out myself. Any other special characters we are missing while we're at it?

[ahankinson]

Actually, I would recommend going with an existing font that supports it, if at all possible. This will make it easier to support the same character across our other systems as well.

[adunning]

There are several fonts with this character, but I think they're all still using the old private-use area codepoint from MUFI. A less alternative is the 'turned semicolon', U+2E35, but again font support is limited. I'll perhaps see if I can get one of the existing fonts updated.

[adunning]

Fonts that now provide this character:

https://github.com/psb1558/Elstob-font

https://github.com/psb1558/Junicode-New/