Re: Roman numerals

Roman numerals originated from Etruscan symbols.  There's an
interesting Wikipedia article about it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

Jukka K. Korpela has politely and patiently explained the situation
concerning Roman numerals.

Some people make distinctions between Roman numerals and
Latin uppercase letters, and I'm one of them.

I was taught, way back in elementary school, to write Roman
numerals with connecting bars above and below.  Those bars
distinguish the numerals from letters.

When I designed glyphs for Roman numerals, I incorporated
that notion into the design.

So, when I want to represent a Roman numeral in plain text,
I will use the Unicode Roman numeral characters for doing so.

Best regards,

James Kass

P.S. - In my opinion, lowercase Latin letters aren't proper Roman
numerals at all.  So, I strongly discourage people from using lowercase
letters to represent Roman numerals.  (But, don't let that stop you
if you are so inclined.  <emoticon>)