IDS question

From: Thomas Chan (thomas@atlas.datexx.com)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2001 - 12:13:51 EDT


Hi all,

I've recently been using Ideographic Description Sequences to describe
some Han characters that are not in Unicode 3.1, and I noticed that
U+3007 is not included in the set of "UnifiedIdeographs", despite having
the "ideographic" property (TUS3.0, p. 269; UAX #27, section 10.1). I
understand that compatibility ideographs are not allowed to participate
in IDS, but U+3007 doesn't have a clone, as far as I know.

There are some characters in LENG Yulong and WEI Yixin's _Zhonghua Zihai_
dictionary (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1994), such as gu2 on p. 31 and lin2 on p.
32 that incorporate a circular component. I'd probably describe them as:

gu2, p. 31:
  U+2FFB IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER OVERLAID
  U+5341 (shi 'ten')
  U+3007 (ling 'zero')

lin2, p. 32:
  U+2FFB IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER OVERLAID
  U+2FFB IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER OVERLAID
  U+5341 (shi 'ten')
  U+3007 (ling 'zero')
  U+3405 ("x"-like shape)

(Both look somewhat like crosshairs.)

However, those aren't valid sequences. I realize the above two characters
are rather odd, but the likes of U+3AB3 and U+3AC8 would have faced the
same problem, since they also incorporate a circular component.

What would be the advisable way to handle these cases, besides
creating invalid IDS sequences, using the PUA, or giving a prose
description?

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



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