Re: text in reverse

Paul F. Schaffner wrote:
>    <p>In Palestine, some coins employ the
>    abbreviation "<seg rend="rtl">BAS</seg>"
>    in Greek characters, that is, "BASILEUS"
>    written in Hebrew order.</p>

Since you are not talking so much about the characters themselves, but about 
the context they are used in, this is the solution I prefer.

> 
> (2) Would mirror-image glyphs (e.g. used in the
> circumstances described above, a left-pointing
> beta or sigma) be regarded as glyph-variants? Or
> as new characters? 

In my book, they are glyph variants, not new characters.  Except for the 
fact that they are mirrored, all other character properties would stay the 
same, right?  On top of that, you might conceivably want to normalize them 
under some circumstances to the standard form.  So if you want to do this, a 
  <glyph> element with the right properties should do the trick.  What 
exactly are the right properties you will have to decide, since your program 
will have to deal with that

All the best,

Christian

--

-- 
  Christian Wittern
  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN