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Writing Systems Technical Resources

Unicode Status for Old Italic

In The Unicode Standard, Old Italic implementation is discussed in Chapter 8 Europe-II: Ancient and Other Scripts and in UTN 40: Old Italic Glyph Variation. Language-specific fonts are required for processing text, as some of the common glyphs may differ slightly from language to language.

Old Italic was encoded in The Unicode Standard version 3.1. The script is encoded in the following block:

BlocksCharacter RangeAdded in Unicode VersionUnicode Chart
Old Italic10300..1032F3.1U10300.pdf

Subsequent to version 3.1, the following characters have been added to the Old Italic script:

CharactersUnicode VersionDocumentation
1031F7.0WG2 N4046, L2/11-146
1032D..1032E10.0WG2 N4669R, L2/15-181
1032F10.0WG2 N4395, L2/12-386

Documentation refers to ISO Working Group and Unicode proposals

A number of proposals for its inclusion have been submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee and WG2:

  • 1992-10-29 Etruscan — Rick McGowan (Unicode Technical Report #3 R2)

  • 1997-05-21 Proposal to add Etruscan to ISO/IEC 10646 — Jenkins (L2/97-101 (not online))

  • 1997-08-16 Proposal for encoding the Etruscan script in ISO/IEC 10646 — Michael Everson (unofficial version of WG2 N1580.html, L2/97-195 (not online))

  • 2000-02-15 Scripts from the Past in Future Versions of Unicode — Carl-Martin Bunz (L2/00-128)

  • 2000-03-21 Request of change to the proposal to add Etruscan to Unicode / ISO 10646 — Dario de Judicibus (L2/00-112)

  • 2000-04-18 Altitalische Sprachen (Markus Dohnicht) — Marc Küster (L2/00-133)

  • 2000-04-21 Proposal for Old-Italic (Archaic European Scripts) — Michael Everson, John Jenkins, Dario de Judicibus (L2/00-140)

  • 2000-04-26 Further comments on historic scripts — Carl-Martin Bunz (L2/00-153)

  • 2000-08-01 Feedback on Old Italic (L2/00-140) — Deborah Anderson (L2/00-246)

  • 2000-08-02 Old Italic feedback: Addendum (on Umbrian and Etruscan glyphs) — Deborah Anderson (L2/00-247)

  • 2000-09-10 Revised glyphs for “Old Italic” — Michael Everson (L2/00-309)

  • 2011-05-17 Proposal to Encode Additional Old Italic Characters — Christopher C. Little (WG2 N4046, L2/11-146)

  • 2012-11-06 Revised Proposal to Encode Additional Old Italic Characters — Christopher C. Little (WG2 N4395, L2/12-386)

  • 2015-07-28 Proposal for the addition of three Old Italic characters — Michael Everson (WG2 N4669R, L2/15-181)

    • UTC #144 Minutes (L2/15-187) (See C.4 for decision and action items)