Sunday, May 04, 2014

[uhfyvnda] Letters without ascenders

The following 19 lowercase letters do not have ascenders so can elegantly take accents or other diacritical marks (e.g., Unicode combining diacritical marks).

a c e g i j m n o p q r s u v w x y z (omitting b d f h k l t)

i and j will require dotless forms.

This can result in very large alphabet for encoding information at high density.

Exploring other scripts:

Latin-1: ø ç æ

Small capitals (e.g., LaTeX textsc): A B D E F G H K L M N Q R T Y (omitting C I J O P S U V W X Z because they look too much like the lowercase forms)

Lowercase numerals (text figures): 2 3 4 5 7 9 (omitting 0 1 because they look like others, omitting 6 8 because of ascenders)

Greek: α γ ε η μ π σ ς ω (omitting ι κ ν ο ρ τ υ χ because they look like Latin in some fonts, and omitting others because they have ascenders. φ may have an ascender if not drawn in cursive style, TeX's varphi. Also potentially available are varpi, varrho, and varkappa, which look different from Latin.)

Cyrillic: д ж и л ц ч ш щ ъ ь ю я љ њ џ (omitting many which look like previous characters, including з э є)

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