address@hidden: Re: Spanish ordinals?]

[Karl Berry]

For the record, I asked a multilingual friend for advice about the
ordinal characters.  See below (omitting his email to try to reduce his
spam :).

Based on this, I have changed @ordf and @ordm in TeX to print in a
smaller size, and am keeping the underbar.  If at some point someone
notices and needs them without the line (e.g., for Italian),
implementing superscripted text in general seems like it would suffice.
Can't do everything at once though.

Cheers,
k


Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:31:08 -0500
From: Steve Peter

> Meanwhile, I'd like to ask advice from both of you.  I just added the
> Spanish ordinal characters to Texinfo (the superscripted a and o), but
> I'm not sure what they are really supposed to look like.  Do they need
> to have a bar underneath, or is the superscripting enough?  And should
> they be just a little smaller (say, 9pt if the text if 10pt) or a lot
> smaller (7pt)?

Good questions, and Felici's Complete Manual of Typography is silent on 
the matter. I have seen variants with and without the underlining in 
Spanish, but I don't know which is considered more elegant or proper. I 
do know that official Portuguese orthography requires use of the 
underline.

As for size, it strikes me that 8pt for a 12pt font is about right 
visually, and the baseline for the superscripting is roughly 2/3 
x-height (i.e., 2/3 of the way up an x, as your examples show.)

Steve


Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:54:47 -0500
From: Steve Peter

On Thursday, Dec 18, 2003, at 18:59 America/New_York, Karl Berry wrote:

>     As for size, it strikes me that 8pt for a 12pt font is about right
>
> Good, good.  I'll reduce the size.
>
>     do know that official Portuguese orthography requires use of the
>     underline.
>
> Then I guess we should keep it.
>
> I didn't know Portuguese used these.  I had only seen them referred to
> "Spanish ordinals" (in the Unicode std, for instance).  Do you know an
> official generic term for them?

I don't know of an official term. One might call them Romance ordinals, 
since Italian (and possibly Romanian, though I can find no examples 
that aren't written out in full in what I have at hand here) also use 
them. The possible fly in the ointment is that in all of the Italian 
examples I've seen here, there is no underline, so we may need to 
provide both variants.

And then there's French, which also suffixes the ending of the ordinal. 
First has either -er or -ère and the rest of the numerals have -e. In 
good French typography, the size seems to be even smaller than in 
Spanish. (Cf. for example the first page of Le Monde, which you can 
grab in PDF off their site www.lemonde.fr--blow up where they write 60e 
année, and compare it to the abbreviation for number (No.) nearby).

Unless you need me to research it further, I'm going to ignore Catalan, 
Occitan, Galician, etc.