Typophile

Greek Ano teleia

Peroyomas

Is there any info about this character (U+0387)? Is said that is used in Greek as an equivalent to the semi-colon in Latin languages (while in Greek, semi-colon works as a question mark). Unicode poorly make it a compatibility decomposition to the Middle dot character (U+00B7), even though is frequently said that the character is "sightly above" the x-height, yet I haven't found enough reference. For a while I thought that a ongoing accepted Unicode proposal for the character 'raised dot' was a replacement, but it is actually a dot that resides between the x-height and the baseline, for use in Greek and Coptic too.

  • Is the symbol (Ano teleia) actually used?
  • Are there any kind of guide of how to design it?
  • Is there any solution to the "compatibility decomposition" issue for the future?
John Hudson

Yes, it is used. I usually align the default ano teleia to the top dot of : and ;. I also provide an all-cap variant aligned to the cap height (OTL 'case' feature') and a smallcap variant aligned to the smallcap height (OTL 'smcp' feature).

You can handle the compatibility mapping issue by providing an OTL 'locl' feature mapping from the period centred glyph to the ano teleia glyph in the Greek script and language system.

Peroyomas

Thanks!
Regarding the OTL 'locl' feature, the actual 'middle dot' isn't used anywhere in Greek text? I believe the only intended use in Latin alphabet is as a separator between two 'l' from different syllables in Catalan, yet some people also use it as multiplication sign (even though there's a separate character for that).

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