SC2 WG2 Nxxxx

L2/12-087

 

Title: Proposed Changes to ISO/IEC 10646 Annex I Ideographic description characters
From: Unicode & US National Body
Date: February 9, 2012

 

ISO/IEC 10646 defines Ideographic Description Sequences (IDSes) in Annex I, and imposes two kinds of restrictions:

 

Those restrictions are actually problematic for two main users of IDSes, namely the IRG and the UTC. The IRG uses IDSes of existing and proposed characters, as a tool to detect potential unifications; those IDSes actually involve private use characters as components. Similarly, potential characters are tracked in UTR#45; for example, the IDS of the biáng character (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi%C3%A1ngbi%C3%A1ng_noodles) exceeds the overall limit.

 

The proposal is to modify annex I to:

 

The UTC has already approved similar changes to The Unicode Standard.