apply a color to contents of <num>?

[arlogriffiths]

Dear all,

I'd like to suggest we apply a color to contents of <num> in display, for the following reasons:

• our transliteration system involves an ambiguity I had not previously been aware of, namely that we use capital i both for vertical bar as part of the Khmer number system and, of course, for independent vowel i. Since the latter occurs only rarely in Khmer-language text, and never as a separate word, while numbers abound there, there is rarely any grounds for confusion, but still it might be good as a matter of principle do disambiguate as much as possible. Of course this could also be done by replacing <num value="1"><g type="numeral">I</g></num> with some kind of bar-shaped symbol, other than "I" and "|", in display
• it may help to detect any cases of numbers where the <num> tag has not been applied

Thoughts?

Arlo

[danbalogh]

Here are my thoughts. I have no objection to displaying the contents of <num> in colour. But in principle, it would be better to colourise the contents of <g type="numeral">, since - as we now allow <num> tagging on words representing numbers - this would not fully eliminate the ambiguity. I mean, in principle, there might in some language be a word "I" that has a numeral meaning, and thus the alphabetic character "I" (and not the Khmer vertical bar) could be tagged as a numeral. What we need to disambiguate, if anything, is that a particular Latin "I" in our transliteration represents a numeral sign, not that it has a numerical meaning.

I am also OK with keeping things as they are, since, as Arlo also points out above, the numeral I will foreseeably never be contiguous to any alphabetic characters, but separated from them by a space. Unless the word "I" can be expected to occur in Khmer (or any language that uses that Khmer vertical bars for numbers), the ambiguity will not occur in practice, only in theory.

Using a different character to display the numeral I also has its appeal. Text printed out from the HTML or copied and pasted to another application may well lose the colouring, so using another character would be a fireproof way to eliminate any ambiguity. It would also be better transliteration practice, so that the letter "I" could be reserved for the independent vowel. There is a fair number of bar-shaped symbols, but they all look too alike to be confidently distinguishable by the human eye, especially since we use various fonts. There are also dedicated Unicode code points for Roman numerals, e.g. U+2160 for Roman 1: Ⅰ - but to the naked eye this is also quite indistinguishable from a capital I (and, depending on the font, may also be indistinguishable from vertical bars).

Having gone over the above in my mind, I suggest we choose one of the following two approaches:

1. the simple one: keep everything as we have it now
2. the complex one: combine the two distinction methods. Colourise the display of <g type="numeral"> (not that of <num>), AND in addition to that, replace any I (capital letter i) within a <g type="numeral"> with something else, preferably with U+2160, Roman Ⅰ. I believe the latter could be done automatically on GitHub (through Travis? I'm ignorant of the technicalities), so that this replace happens in our actual XML files and not only as a display transformation. This way, ambiguity will only occur if the colour styling of the transformed HTML is lost, and even then the notation will only be ambiguous to the human eye, and human readers can be expected know from the context that the character they see is a numeral (i.e. neither a punctuation mark nor a capital letter i).

[ajaniak]

Dear all,

I need to know of you have taken a decision on the subject.

Also, if you decide in favor of coloring numbers, I need to know in which color you expect <g type="numeral">.

best,

[manufrancis]

I concur with Daniel that the letter "I" should be reserved for the independent vowel. I vote for the complex approach. Arlo? What do you think?

[arlogriffiths]

@michaelnmmeyer: has solution 2 proposed by Dan actually been implemented? in a recent discussion, we all concurred without remembering the present issue on not using color for <num>. Now perhaps we have to reconsider. So I am reopening this.