L2/01-395
From: Asmus Freytag [asmusf@ix.netcom.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2001 12:15 AM

Subject: Report from the WG2 Meeting in Singapore




Major actions:

Amendments:
AMD 1 to part 1 is going out to FDAM vote with a few changes from the FPDAM
sixteen additional characters - RIAL SIGN and 15 Variation selectors
no MES-3A or 3B collection
minor adjustment to UTF-8 definition
For further details look at the disposition of comments.

AMD 2 to part is going out as PDAM
Limbu, Dai Le and a smattering of characters
See document N2395 for the details of the proposed repertoire.

AMD 1 to part 2 is also going out as PDAM
Aegean scripts, Osmanian, Shavian, Ugaritic and Variation selectors
See document N2396 for the details of the proposed repertoire.

Ad-hocs:
A lot of time at the meeting was taken up with Khmer issues. The Cambodian
national body brought a very large delegation. All in all, their group was
very diverse. It included an Australian, a German, a Japanese, and several
Cambodians who had lived abroad for an extensive period, or still do. We
were able to have discussions in English, French, German, and Japanese
the them. However, it was unfortunate that our Khmer experts could not
attend due to travel restrictions in one case and a personal conflict
in another. Nevertheless, we were able to cover many issues, for example
the impact of normalization on some of the characters that they are
proposing. Their position is that they would like to replace the virama
model with what they call 'subscripts'. We are trying to convince them
that the virama model is not only adequate, but a reasonable approach to
encoding Khmer, and that adding characters that follow a different model
at this time just introduces alternate spellings with all the attendant
confusion and normalization issues. (Documents N2380 and N2385 give
some of the background).On behalf of Unicode, I invited them to attend
one of our UTC meetings.

Besides Khmer, there was a Korean ad-hoc, which is trying to decide which
of the DPRK characters should be added as compatibility characters. Some
of the least controversial ones of them are in the draft of AMD 2, but
I am sure that draft will engender lively comments. In addition to the
characters reviewed this time, there is a set of 160 compatibility
ideographs. It was pointed out that we have 151 slots left on Plane 0,
so they will attempt to reduce their set to fit in this space and
propose a set that will complete that block.


Other:
WG2 approved two policy statements. One asked SC2 to formally support
the "write-only" nature of character and name allocation. The other
supports the editor in that repertoire or glyph change requests for
which fonts are not available for use by both WG2 and Unicode, can
be held back until such fonts become available.

The next WG2 meeting will be in Dublin, the week following the IUC.
It will focus on continuing the  discussion on Khmer, as well as
(hopefully) progressing the two new amendments to FPDAMs.

A./