User:Phil wink/Short schrift

Goals
How should quantitative scansion best be presented in Wikipedia?

Ideally, the symbols used will meet all these criteria (though, as we'll see, there will in fact be trade-offs):
 * 1) Symbols likely to display correctly on most devices
 * 2) Monospaces correctly (really, a special instance of #1)
 * 3) Easily intelligible to readers
 * 4) Easy to type and edit
 * 5) Faithfully reflect existing scansion traditions

With respect to criterion #1, I tested all characters under discussion here in 2016 using several relatively standard and capacious fonts I happened to have on my computer (Arial Unicode, Calibri, Consolas, Courier New, DejaVu Sans, Liberation Sans, Linux Libertine G, Lucida Sans Unicode, TeXGyreScholia, Times New Roman).

Longum
There are really only 3 rational choices to indicate a long syllable:

The hyphen, although the easiest to type, is extremely short and therefore a dubious choice when trying to symbolize long. When monospaced, 2 EM-dashes in a row tend to run into each other and look like 1 great line, whereas 2 EN-dashes are distinct. The EN-dash is also the character recommended by Brill. Therefore, the EN-dash is the soundest overall choice.

Anceps
Only 2 choices suggest themselves for anceps:

Brill (linked above) calls for the multiplication sign, an argument in its favor. Possibly since these characters are so visually similar and neither seems to present meaningful drawbacks, either should be acceptable as long as practice is consistent within an article. However, if u is used for brevis (as is recommended below), then a plain lowercase x is more fitting visually (and easier to type), and should probably be preferred.

Brevis
Typographically, brevis is the most difficult of the common symbols. It presents both the most possibilities and the most display problems.

I feel a little dirty every time I see a homely lowercase u in a quantitative scansion. However, the deficits of the other options are, to me, decisive. Lowercase u is the only choice that consistently displays as expected and needed without drawbacks (other than aesthetics).

Other symbols
For foot divisions, the pipe (|) should be preferred to the slash (/). This is because slash frequently stands for ictus, accent, stress, beat, etc. in various scansion systems, and the pipe should help reduce confusion.

Similarly, for caesura, 2 pipes should be used. There is a single double-pipe glyph available in many fonts ; however, this was available in most but not all of the fonts I tested, and 2 pipes remains significantly easier to type than the double-pipe character, so I think 2 pipes should still be preferred.

These symbols (×, –, u, |, ||) should accommodate the majority of Greek and Latin scansions. However, the complexity of the task should not be minimized; Brill notes no fewer than 26 symbols! A few additional suggestions are made below:
 * = u (brevis in longo… underline variant)
 * = ū (brevis in longo… macron variant) This variant should be preferred because, lacking markup, it will align correctly when monospaced WYSISYG scansion is attempted.
 * = uu (biceps) In specialist fonts (like New Athena Unicode) this is available as a single glyph; however, since such specialist fonts are not present on the vast majority of users' machines, this markup version of the biceps is the only one that will display correctly. If used in monospaced scansion WYSIWYG editing will fail, but correct alignment can still be achieved.
 * = u&#x035D;u ("triceps") A little nuts, but common in Plautus and Terence; even New Athena Unicode does not appear to include this.

Other languages
Many languages beyond Greek and Latin have quantitative prosodies, and these come with their own scansion systems. However, my initial research (for the gory details, see User:Phil wink/Quantitative scansion code) suggests that broadly speaking these scansions can be translated into classical scansion without loss, whereas the reverse is not always true. Moreover, classical scansion is more likely to be understood by more readers of the English Wikipedia with briefer explanation, than are other systems. Therefore, while all prosodic systems deserve to be explained in their own terms, for individual scansions and for discussions of verse form where an in-depth remedial lesson on the language's prosody would be out of place, it is best to present quantitative scansions in classical symbols, even when this is not native practice for the verse in question. Native scansions may of course be presented along with classical scansions, where appropriate.

A note on WYSIWYG
The 2 best options for WYSIWYG editing and display of scanned verse are described at WP:POETRY.