Hi,
there are some commercial fonts which claim to have a arabic->roman
feature (may be reduced to the numbers up to 5000 or so) e.g. P22
Operina Pro.
Btw: Arabic->Roman is probably much easier to implement than the
inverse. I don't know font details, but from what I have read, it could
be as simple as
sub one ? ?? ??? by one.M ? ?? ???
...
sub five ? by five.L
where the ? are wildcards (do these exist?)
What the OP wants is that "CXV" is stored as a unique glyph representing 115.
Am I the OP? (I don't know that abbreviation and therefore I am
confused.) But this question is interesting:
Roman Numerals derive from a alphabetic writing system and thus are
"words" consisting of single "letters" with a meaning based on its
identity and position. But nowadays, they are more often read as
logograms. That's presumably the reason, why Unicode has codepoints for
the roman numerals from 1 to 12 (why 12?).
So should CXV be stored as an ideogram for 115 or composed of three
glyphs 1.C, 1.X and 5.V?
In the PDF ISO standard, you have the option of using /ActualText tagging.
The PDF would contain a portion of the page contents stream, such as:
/Span<</ActualText(115)>>BMC .... (graphics to position and produce
the letters 'C' 'X' and 'V' ) ... EMC
Now *any* attempt to select any portion of the visible string "CXV"
is supposed to result in the whole string being included when copying.
That seems to be a good solution for pdf-targets. Copypasting parts of
words is mostly senseless or wrong, so this shouldn't be a problem. I
can't think of an example with a non-pdf-target in which I use roman
numerals. But someone else might. Then, the discussion should be moved.
The problem is that not all PDF browsers are fully conformant, so this
behaviour may not be what you actually get with a particular piece of
software. (BTW, Apple is one of the biggest offenders.)
That's the non-conformat PDF browsers fault and I don't give a damn
about Apple. The only time I care about writing apple with a capital A
is at the beginning of a sentence. (Pun intended.)
Note that ISO PDF also has an alternative method of tagging.
E.g.
/Span<</Alt(123)>>BMC .... EMC
Screen-readng software is meant to use the /Alt tagging.
And both /Alt and /ActualText allow multiple values having been preceded
by a /Lang tag, so that the actual vocalization generated by the
screen-reader can be adjusted for different languages --- the document
author normally would provide this, but a sophisticated PDF browser
plug-in might be programmed to produce a translation on-the-fly.
What exactly is the intention of the /Alt tagging?
Actually, Roman numerals are mostly used when the numerical information is
almost irrelevant as such. Nobody uses the "XIV" in "Louis XIV" to perform
calculations. That's just a different way of writing "quatorze".
Right. So /ActualText tagging can support this distinction in meaning.
It is *not* intended to support calculations --- that is the domain
of "Content Tagging" using MathML.
As nearly all roman numerals used in pratice are in the range up to
5000, no on-the-fly calculation should be needed. That can be done by
the producing software.
I see it just as the ability to copy "quatorze" from a text and paste it into a
worksheet cell accepting numbers to get 14. In the case of Roman numerals
it may be simpler, of course. But is it useful?
Most certainly it is useful.
It is part of the way of the future for smart PDF documents.
Exactly. It is a different representation form of numbers not the actual
letters. It doesn't matter, when the pdf is only intended to be printed,
but for electronic use, it does matter.
bye
Toscho
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