Unicode 4.1 and Slavic Philology : Problems and Perspectives (II)
Sebastian Kempgen · 2021
Sebastian Kempgen Unicode 4.1 and Slavic Philology Problems and Perspectives (II) 0. Introduction In the first paper devoted to the current state of encoding Slavic characters into Unicode (KEMPGEN 2006) 1 we gave an introduction to the topic, outlined various achievements in the current version of Unicode (v.4.1 , 2005), mainly because not all of them are common knowledge or available in standard fonts like Times or Times New Roman, and then we discussed many of the historic or special characters of the Slavic languages that have not yet been encoded in Unicode.Space did not permit us to cover everything in the first article, so this second article will take up where the first paper left, and will also present more illustrative material for some of the topics from the first article.The reader might find it useful to be familiar with the first article before reading the present one, but knowledge of the first article is not a prerequisite.As for the first paper, it should be noted that the purpose of this paper is not to claim that all characters mentioned in this article should be encoded in Unicode, but merely to point out those areas where further investigation is needed, where a common understanding of the principles and practice of treating characters should be developed among Slavicists.The paper is also meant to be a contribution to formal proposals which will be submitted to Unicode, Inc. to have more characters encoded.One important thing that is also worth repeating is that if a character, may it be a letter, an accent or some other sign, is defined in Unicode, that does not mean that a certain font contains an image of that character.Thus, it would be a misconception to think that because font X does not have character Y, Y is not available in Unicode.Most people today will, for example, use Times New Roman (from Monotype) on the PC (and now on the Macintosh, too), and Times (from Linotype) on the Macintosh.A comparison of these two common fonts (see Appendix) will show that, unfortunately, Times New Roman has less to offer to a Slavicist than Times, but Times is not as widespread on the PC whereas on the Macintosh it is a standard since the invention of desktop publishing in the 80's (although of course only now under OS X with an extended Unicode character set). 2 1 Available electronically from the 'Kodeks' server: http://kodeks.uni-bamberg.de/ 2It might be worth pointing out that version 3.05 of both Times New Roman and Arial for the Macintosh have the same character set as their PC counterparts.Thus, any data and file exchange that is based on these fonts will be completely without problems.