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Encoding of character / glyph differences

  • Unicode will allocate a block with 256 codepoints for variance identifiers. They work in conjunction with an adjoining codepoint to identify a glyph that should be used to render the character in question instead of the default glyph for this character, if available. The tables that identify these glyphs are maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Assignment has to go through the usual standardization process. For many cases of usage within TEI, this will not provide a solution.
  • Glyph level distinctions beyond the level encoded in Unicode should be expressed using markup constructs. One example for how this can be accomplished is available in the W3C SVG recommendation (using a element <altGlyph>, the content of which contains the text glossed upon, with an attribute pointing to a glyph somewhere that is to be used instead), another example is in MathML.
  • Private Use Area (PUA) codepoints should be avoided for use in TEI documents intended for interchange. Local usage is encouraged. Such local usage should be packaged with entity references to avoid codepoint collision at the receiving end.