In case you didn't already heard from others, there's the http://xml.coverpages.org site hosting lots of pre-2000 material related to ISO 8879 (SGML) and XML. Although I didn't find too much on a quick ad-hoc search for ISO 9573, there's mention of angzarr in a preview version of ISO 9573 at http://xml.coverpages.org/ISO-PDTR-9573-13-2004.pdf by Martin Bryant and David Carlisle.
There's also casual mention of ISO 9573 on historical comp.text.sgml Usenet archives.
David and other people involved with SGML, MathML, and early entity sets for math (and chemical etc.) symbols are hanging around on the xml-dev mailing list (https://www.xml.org/xml-dev) and perhaps can tell more about the origin of that character (which looks more like a symbol for military or electrotechnical use to my totally uneducated eye).
Also, there's a typo in your post: Belisage Conference -> Balisage Conference ;)
When I tried to request it via ILL, they told me that the amount of material scanned "exceeds copyright law and scanning limits". I haven't bothered to look up whatever law that is, and I'm not sure if it's a US thing, or if it's on the UK side, and if so, whether students/faculty at Cambridge are under the same restrictions and they'd have to end up paying the same fees as well. I have a friend whose advisor works there, but I'm reluctant to ask them for the favour and potentially drag them into numerous back-and-forth emails with Cambridge Library and copyright issues...
> When you request a scan, you will be asked to confirm that you acknowledge a copyright declaration which states that you have not already been supplied with a copy of the same material, that you will use the copy only for non-commercial research or private study, nor supply the copy to another person. Copyright forms will be retained by the University Library in perpetuity. (emphasis added)
Wow! Pretty bold promise from a university that’s already been around for 1000 years or whatever. I feel like they’re really staking their credibility on indefinite document retention here lol.
My brother completed his Master's at Queen's College Cambridge and the porters there offer indefinite storage for all active students and alum. He stored his road bicycle in their storage there for something like 8 years before finally getting back out there and arranging to have it shipped. They're pretty big on retention, is my point.
> In particular, 妛 was probably created when printers tried to create 𡚴 by cutting and pasting 山 and 女 together.
It's crazy to think that a lot of written Kanji and Hanzi come from print drifting and a small accumulation of errors, similar to how many new words are formed in spoken language.
There are also character variants. Sometimes between CJK, but also historic. I attended a conference at Academica Sinica in Taipei with knowledgeable academic sorts circa 2001 who had apparently elucidated various issues with Unicode unification coming from the full range of prior encodings, fonts, dictionaries, input systems and mechanical typesetting systems.
I (through my own ignorance?) haven't had much appreciation for this bit of history, but I recently visited the fascinating Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp.
They were a publisher and printing house in Antwerp, starting in the early waves of printing presses that swept Europe after Gutenberg.
Amazingly, it stayed in the family and the family obviously had an incredible devotion to their origins, they have their original presses (thought to be the oldest in the world), their original type (their founder was a big believer in the power of good type and bought up the rights where he could), the original building, their original library. It is quite the adventure (in a totally nerdish but culturally significant way!).
It was eventually sold to the city where it has been a museum ever since.
Back to the topic at hand, I agree with you, can't someone acquire this??! :)
I've often thought that the best Civilization would actively maintain living examples of each historical milieu. A stone age place and a middle ages place, a mid century place, and so on. In this way the methods and knowledge of the past would not be lost, and in the event of a calamity (like a Carrington event, or nuclear war), it would accelerate our recovery. Presumably the highest tech'd civ would impose order on the rest to prevent the stronger civs attacking the weaker ones (only the strongest civ could possibly enforce this).
(The prospect of having to recapitulate the advances of the last 200 years fills me with indescribably weariness. Physical typesetting being a good example. Who is foolish enough to think you can "just read a book about it" and get a working press going?)
Interesting thought experiment. I'd wager there are equally interesting ethics challenges that would need addressing in order to actually do something like this well.
My understanding is that the archive isn't being disposed of, but will be going into the Science Museum long term storage. The photographs are not intended as a replacement for the collections.
After decades of corporate propaganda, the mainstream view is that "goverment can't do anything".
This has led to people expecting the rich to donate for this sort of outcome, instead of demanding better organization from the government that's eating away almost half their income.
Adobe could easily make a one-time donation of $millions to set up an endowment which would keep them running for the foreseeable future. The government could as well, I just see it as less likely. The government seems much more likely to maintain an active control over something like this, opening up the possibility of political interference in the future.
Unfortunately, as neither faculty nor a student at the University of Cambridge, according to the quote they’ve given me, requesting a digital copy of this document would cost 174£
Maybe just do a go fund me or something to raise the 174£? That is, if no students or faculty from the university of Cambridge see this and help.
Cambridge alum here (for my BA in 2009) but I'm in CA now. Would be willing to try putting in the request. Not sure how to contact Jonathan Chan... I'm not on any of the social media he lists in his site footer... Anyone see an email for him? Edit: nevermind, found it. Emailing him
Just post on r/cambridge and/or r/cambridge_uni reddit & ask if a current or ex-student or faculty member would be willing to request it from the stacks & make a copy.
There’s bound to be someone who’ll drop in a request on their behalf.
Finding a Cambridge student or faculty willing to help doesn't seem like it'd be super hard, the university has 6000 academic staff and 25000 students.
Also on the edge of my seat here, wondering what field it could be from. My ChatGPT-esque BS story is that this symbol was misplaced alongside more abstract math-y symbols and was actually briefly used in schematics to identify "lightning conductor" components shown here https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/wp-content/uploads... ... plausible, yes?
It’s a good theory, but shouldn’t it show up regularly in electrical schematics then? It doesn’t sound like anyone in any particular fields (other than possibly German mathematics or Dutch economics) has been able to point to historical common usage.
OP, if you are reading this, please contact me (email on website in bio). I would like to find a way to help fund the digital request to continue this research.
I remember the previous post and find it weirdly compelling - the cruft and leftovers as technology evolves is interesting - it's like the appendix of monotype. I'm looking forward to the movie adaptation where he drives himself completely crazy trying to find out what the symbol means. I appreciate and can relate to this need to dig into minutiae.
I've added a clarification to the end of the post on whether angzarr might be found in the Cambridge Library document, which I mentioned in my twitter thread but not in the post:
> Furthermore, the Rare Books department tells me that “unfortunately none of [the materials] seem to mention S16137 through S16237”. It’s possible the glyph is listed without its serial number, but it’s equally possible that this document skips that range altogether, just as 4-Line Mathematics had.
I'd also like to point out that Cambridge alumni are unlikely going to be able to request scans for free; I think you need to be a current faculty or student.
The now deprecated FONT FACE attribute was defined as a comma-separated list of names. The entity was needed if you had a font name with a comma in it.
Another comma-separated list is in the TH|TD AXIS attribute which is considered obsolete now. I found two other CSL attributes in APPLET ARCHIVE (depr.) and AREA COORDS but neither of them need a comma entity.
So the comma entity exists only as a historical artifact.
Perhaps for usage as an escaped form of `,` in comma separated value tables? Although good question why it's in the HTML spec, pasting raw csv inside of an element and then needing to read it back seems like a rare use case.
Those symbols (including comma) were added in later editions of the standard, and I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems to me if your keyboard has the characters & and ; it will also have , no? I mean, why not add &a; for a then?
I wonder if this is some sort of “signature character”, that the designer would use to discover if their work had been lifted, possibly dating back centuries.
I’m sure somebody on here can help have a look. If you put in a scan and deliver request then apparently you aren’t meant to share it with anybody else due to copyright, but I know somebody who could request it and I’m sure could find the symbol in there.
I've asked a friend who is sort of kind of a faculty member; they may or may not be able to get access (they have a rather bespoke institutional status), so please other people keep trying!
I’m hoping that when we finally get to the bottom of this mystery, we’ll find out that Aleister Crowley had it slipped into Monotype for magickal reasons.
I don't like it either but its not a bad name. Octothorpe is dumb because there is nothing on it that ocures 8 times. We could call it 'pound', making it like the 8th common thing we call pound, or we can say "the number symbol" which is also dumb. Language filled a gap, hopefully it evolves into something more generic like 'hash sign' or 'hash mark'
It might not have the answers he's looking for. When I've gone on such hunts, yeah, any one cost isn't so bad, but if I open that box of paying for documents, I could easily drop thousands of dollars and not actually be any closer to the answer.
There's also casual mention of ISO 9573 on historical comp.text.sgml Usenet archives.
David and other people involved with SGML, MathML, and early entity sets for math (and chemical etc.) symbols are hanging around on the xml-dev mailing list (https://www.xml.org/xml-dev) and perhaps can tell more about the origin of that character (which looks more like a symbol for military or electrotechnical use to my totally uneducated eye).
Also, there's a typo in your post: Belisage Conference -> Balisage Conference ;)
Good luck.