L2/03-405

Subject: Summary of status of IDS for CJK Extension B
Source: John H. Jenkins
Date: 31 October 2003

This is an update on the status of the work Cora Chang is doing,
generating Ideographic Description sequences for everything in CJK
Extension B. 

Cora has generated 17,653 IDS’s, which covers 41% of the 42,711
characters in Extension B. (I will submit her work in text and
PDF form as separate documents.) A review of her work so far,
however, shows some systematic errors and a number of invalid
sequences. I would make a couple of recommendations:

1) I should write up a document (which can become a UTR) going
into more detail on IDS’s than the standard currently does with
detailed examples on how to break down characters into an IDS.
This would help Cora in her analyses. I can also write a program
for her to use in entering IDS’s which would validate them as she
entered them and let her enter them graphically, which would
speed up the process, avoid typographical errors, and make sure
that what she enters is valid. 

2) In the long-term, we should switch to using the CDL described
by Richard Cook and Tom Emerson. It provides a more flexible way
to describe unencoded ideographs, and one more amenable to font
generation. 

Indeed, I think that the CDL could be made a UTR. We should also
recommend it to the IRG for their Extension C work. If nothing
else, it would speed up the process of making a font for Extension C.