Anyone know what these glyphs are?

DTY
28 Apr 2010 — 5:09pm

Ounce and scruple (apothecaries' measures). There are also minim and dram signs. And yes.

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BeauW
28 Apr 2010 — 7:00pm

Wow, thanks. That is much more exciting than I expected.

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R.
29 Apr 2010 — 2:11am

By the way: All these glyphs are included in Unicode, i. e. ounce (℥), scruple (℈), minim (♏) and dram (ℨ). However, they cannot be found in most typefaces: Even Cambria Math, Junicode and Lucida Sans Unicode are, for whatever reason, lacking ‘♏’; this latter is in Linux Libertine from which all the other symbols are absent again. Arial Unicode and Code2000 are complete in this respect — as probably some more are.

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jstypo
3 May 2010 — 6:19am

By the way, grammer is grammar, even in 1868 ;-)

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Andreas Stötzner
3 May 2010 — 6:55am

R.: ♏ is not ‘minim’, its the zodiac sign for Scorpio.

(More about measurement sings)

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R.
3 May 2010 — 8:59am

In fact, it is, Andreas, but it may used in place of the minim sign.

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BeauW
3 May 2010 — 11:13am

"♏ is not ‘minim’, its the zodiac sign for Scorpio."

I found that confusing, looking up the unicode values. The Scorpio sign is NOT the Minum sign. They are different glyphs. Kind of close, but not quite. But we are supposed to pretend? Kind of irritating.

"By the way, grammer is grammar, even in 1868 ;-)"

Grammer isn't math, it can and has changed over the years. Usage is even more flexible.
(The book also lists 'wrought' as the past tense of 'work'. "I wrought overtime this week.")

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Nick Shinn
3 May 2010 — 11:40am

I didn't include those in my Victorian revival, the Modern Suite, but I did include the "per" symbol, for the sole reason I like the look of it. So I had to do a version for every style in the family; here are some:

I don't think it has much currency today. Even though customers could probably figure out what it meant, it's still a somewhat dubious commercial proposition.

What do you think?

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John Hudson
3 May 2010 — 12:15pm

I found that confusing, looking up the unicode values. The Scorpio sign is NOT the Minum sign. They are different glyphs. Kind of close, but not quite. But we are supposed to pretend?

♏ U+264F is annotated ‘= minim, drop’, indicating that this character is intended to be used for both scorpius and minim.

Somewhat confusingly, ♍ U+264D (virgo) is annotated as ‘= minim (alternate glyph)’.

If you wanted to make the case for disunifying the minim sign from U+264F, you would need to be able to document a consistent glyph distinction in pre-Unicode usage.