Overline option

First, I would like to say that I’m quite impressed with the Tropy tool so far after a few days of use.

I work with a lot of Latin documents that use overlines to abbreviate words, so I would like to have an overline feature in the formatting pane (alongside the underline feature).

Just to make sure, you are looking for something that would be achievable only using text-decoration: overline in HTML/CSS and not using Unicode alone, right?

Yes, I think the CSS text-decoration:overline implementation is what I’m looking for, as I believe that the overline and strikethrough options in the notes are also implemented via CSS.

Our main concern is that we don’t want to add additional decorations for syntax which could be achieved using unicode. Using the proper unicode features would be preferable and we’d like to encourage it, if possible. I’ve tried to make sense of the Wikipedia article on scribal abbreviation, specifically the unicode section, but I don’t know if that applies to your use case. Could you post a few text examples to illustrate what you’re looking for exactly? Most importantly, I think it would be important to know how many letters are modified by the line (one or many?).

I don’t think this applies in our case. Here we need to document abbreviation through suspension where the scribe just overlines one or more letters to create an ad hoc abbreviation (see the section in the same Wikipedia article on suspension.

In the majority of cases, there are multiple letters modified by the overline. The overline may cover one or more characters, and sometimes the entire word, and while there are a few universally accepted forms, most of these abbreviations vary scribe by scribe and whether the entire word can be gleaned from the context. As such, there are no unicode representations of these (indeed, it would be an infeasible task). That is, they are not standard abbreviation symbols like U+A76A but rather non-standard forms of abbreviation by contraction that are often dictated by page width, time/cost considerations, etc.

I have posted some examples below. The text in parentheses are the letters that are overlined.

b(na) = beneficia
(hita) = habita
(mo) = modo
d(ctam) = dictam
(pntem) = presentem
(pnt) = presentem
h(rdib) = heredibus
u(na) = unam
(etia) = etiam
(nmq) = numque

Thanks for this! You’re right, the best option here is to add an extra text-decoration (we just wanted to make sure). We’ll add this with 1.0.3 due out later this week (hopefully!).

This feature was released in version 1.0.3 – get it today!

Thanks so much! The feature works great and is will make our transcribing much clearer.