Typophile

New Unicode Character

Hrant H Papazian

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Recording artist, music producer and actor Cordozar Calvin Broadus, AKA Snoop Dogg submits proposal to Unicode Consortium for addition of new character: "Latin capital A preceded by dot with dot above, niggaz".

According to Snoop Dogg's publicist Kisha Maldonado this initial foray into character encoding is the typographic sista of the artist's seminal debut album of 1993. Maldonado did not elaborated on the practical necessity of adding "Latin capital A preceded by dot with dot above, niggaz" to Unicode. However sources close to the artist indicate that this effort is intended as a viability test of devising a bespoke writing system for elegantly encoding rap lyrics.

Steve Small, an agent for Snoop Dogg revealed the following further details:
• The proposed location of "Latin capital A preceded by dot with dot above, niggaz" is immediately behind any suitable bottom-heavy character.
• The structural viability of the proposed new character was confirmed by means of a prolonged, multi-party, psychokinetic séance with Eric Gill.
• Although Unicode does not proscribe or even prescribe specifics of glyph rendering, Snoop Dogg is mandating that the ideal position of the Dot Above is slightly to the left of the apex of the "A". According to copious research by noted scientist Kevin Larson this position reduces the risk of resultant neck pain. Further research is needed to ascertain any benefit to readers.
• In spite of the potential for courting controversy the first typeface to have "Latin capital A preceded by dot with dot above, niggaz" added to its glyph repertoire will be Miles Newlyn's Missionary.

hnp

Riccardo Sartori

Shortly after the annuncement, italian clothing company A-Style declared intention to sue over copyright infringement.

Mans

Unicode should make this top priority.

Happy new month!

Thomas Milo

This is a welcome and long awaited addition to the Unicode repertoire. As for the typographic details, these are of course left to the experts. I would like to propose an additional refinement of the proposal, based on my Arabic expertise. I need to remind the experts that there exists a related character, with the exact same function, that could be described as Latin capital A followed by a dot and with a dot below, commonly known as niggiz. Careful analysis reveals that the Latin capital A preceded by dot with dot above, niggaz and the Latin capital A followed by dot with dot below, niggiz are in complementary distribution. Therefore, they can be considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, that I propose to call NUGUZ. I therefore advise to amend the proposal to the effect that a single Unicode character be exploited to cover both letters. The selection mechanism can be left to smart font technology, in a manner analogous to what is now commonplace in Arabic font handling. I realize that the resulting graphic balance between the two glyphs will be a challenge for physiotypographers.

John Hudson

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Captured from web.archive.org on 18 Oct 2013. view this capture