Print the codepoint of a unicode glyph represented by a latex command.

[William F Hammond]

Michal --

Thanks for your reply.

You write in part:

> This is why PUA characters are used. I will fix the mapping in TeX4ht
> to use regular numbers instead. Old style numbers can be requested
> using CSS.

And thanks for pointing out the option of using, e.g.,
<span style="font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums;">9</span>
instead of a PUA entry with a corresponding webfont.

The first thing I want to point out here, as you yourself
must know, is that the (relatively new) CSS option will not
work with an arbitrary font.  In particular, it does not
work with the default serif font in my browser.  The old
style numerals must exist somewhere in the font, and I see
that as a kludge.

Moreover, some authors, for example TEI encoders, will (or
should) see \textnineoldstyle as differing from the regular
"9" at the content level.  If that is so, then making the
distinction between them only with style code is a semantic
loss.  It is like having \textminus and the various dashes
be CSS-characterized versions of the ascii hyphen.  ( And
this in a world where the ascii apostrophe (&#x27;) should
never appear in HTML because the glyph for it should, it is
said, always be identical to the glyph for the
right-single-quote.  :-) )

I would rather see the TeX community standardize the PUA,
synced with Latin Modern, for itself, and then down the road
leverage that to argue for public unicode slots for the ten
old-style numerals.

                              -- Bill

Email: hmwlfsr at yahoo.com
       gellmu at gmail.com
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http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/

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