Friday 22 March 2024

Unicode Numeral Systems 2

Ray Toal recently enlightened me on the existence of two interesting number systems: Kaktovik numerals and Cistercian numerals.

I haven't updated my list of numeral systems since Unicode 14.0.0 (see original blog post), so I thought I'd revisit the whole "Universe" project and update it to Unicode 15.1.0.

The vigesimal Kaktovik numerals are supported by Unicode 15.0.0 (U+1D2C0 to U+1D2D3), but, at the time of writing, Google Noto font support is still shuffling along the pipe, so they are difficult to display:

[source]

Cistercian numerals are interesting as they are (sort of) base-10000, but they have not been allocated a Unicode range, although the proposal dates back to 2020.

[source]

The Cistercian numeral clock tickled my fancy.