Along with my principled resistance to using Gothic letters in textual criticism, I have for a while also been personally opposed to using letters for the majuscules. Instead, I have tried to restrict myself to the Gregory-Aland numbers. The reason for this is that the numbers are never duplicated and so avoid the confusion my students regularly experience between D in the Gospels and D in Paul, for example. My preference is, no doubt, influenced by my frequent use of the ECM, which only uses the numerical designations in the text volumes. Once I got used to the numbers, the letter designations began to fade.However, this week, I have realized one (and only one?) benefit of using letters. What’s lost in restricting myself to the numbers alone is the connection between the Greek and Latin diglots. D F G often agree and are thought to have a shared ancestor. But, if the apparatus only lists them as 06 010 012 then it’s easy to miss the evidence of their Latin counterparts designated as the lower case d f g.
The easiest solution is to use both the numerical and letter designations (e.g., D/06). But that still gets a bit cumbersome.