Eth and Thorn characters

[rja]

From: rja at edison.GE.COM (rja)

  There have been a flurry of postings (primarily in comp.std.unix)
about ISO 8859/1 (8 bit character set for western European languages).

A recent posting has inquired about what the Eth and Thorn characters
look like.

Eth is similar in appearance to the letter D.  However, eth has an additional
horizontal line about halfway vertically up on the left-hand vertical stroke.
This horizontal line extends to the left of where a D would stop and goes
halfway between the curved and vertical strokes of the D.  The horizontal
stroke is symmetric with respect to the vertical left-hand line of a D.

Lowercase eth follows the same pattern with respect to the d, except that
the horixontal line is about 3/4 up the vertical line of a "d".  The line
should be halfway between the top of the vertical line and the place where
the round part of the "d" meets the straight part (upper connection).

Thorn upper and lower case follows this same pattern except that replace all
instances of "d" and "D" above with "p" and "P".  The lowercase thorn has
its horizontal line on the stem as part of the descender and the upper case
thorn has its horizontal line on the stem rather than between the intersections
of the straight and vertical lines forming the top of the "P".

While these characters are originally Icelandic/Norse, the Eth characters are
also used in Vietnamese (Quoc Ngu).  Vietnamese is normally written using a
Roman-style script that has an amasing number of diacritical marks, so it isn't
quite handled by ISO 8859/1.  ISO 8859/1 does come close though....

  I haven't any reasonable way to generate a bit-map or Postscript image, but
these descriptions should get the general idea across to the folks at Prime,
DEC, etc. so they can implement them.

 I'd be interested in getting mail from anyone who knows if a standard character
set exists for Vietnamese.

______________________________________________________________________________
         rja at edison.GE.COM      or      ...uunet!virginia!edison!rja  
             "Noalias must go, this is non-negotiable."  DMR
______________________________________________________________________________

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 56