The Comite international de paleographie latine does have an ongoing project to create a standardized vocabulary of codicology. It's a far cry from graphical metrics, of course, but any attempt to create a framework for the description of hands should certainly take it into account:
http://vocabulaire.irht.cnrs.fr/vocab.htm
The site is "optimized for use with IE," and my Safari can't handle it. So much for standardization. ;-)
Josh Westgard
--On Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:36 AM -0600 Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca wrote:
Arianna:
"can be described" meant "can be described using words and images," not "can be described using special-purpose tags." The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that.
Murray