I would NOT like to see our committees' hands tied by taking this
list as more than guidelines. I understand that it is for an FAQ but
there should be text therein to emphasize that these are not binding.
At 19:10 +0000 2002-07-03, Timothy Partridge wrote:
>Why not just presentation glyphs in general? We seem to have queries about
>Indian cojuncts fairly frequently.
>
>Some more suggestions (some of which have covered from other angles already)
>
>- No scripts with a limited body of text in existance. (No need to exchange
>or analyse on computer.) E.g. Phaistos disk script
If the Phaistos disk were bilingual and deciphered, it could be added
even if there were only one document. Why not?
>- No scripts which are poorly understood and it is not clear as to what the
>characters are. E.g. Rongo-rongo.
True.
>- No symbols that are just a picture of something with no other meaning e.g.
>a dog. (These tend not to have a fixed conventional form.)
For instance, Blissymbols has a dog symbol in it. Granted,
Blissymbols is a separate script so maybe that isn't so convincing.
But what if a series of hotel symbols were added, with things like NO
SMOKING, NO DOGS, GUIDE DOGS appeared? Those do have some sort of
real semantic even though the glyphs may vary.
>- No symbols that are only used in diagrams rather than running text. e.g.
>electrical component symbols.
Probably unassailable.
>- No personal, ideosyncratic or company logos. E.g. the artist when he was
>not known as Prince.
This IS a rule.
>- No archaic styles of existing characters. E.g. dotless j.
There are some archaic characters already encoded, and N'Ko is going
to have two of them. Probably.
>- No control codes for fancy text. E.g. begin bold
We have BEGIN SLUR in Western Music already. Might have use for BEGIN
and END CARTOUCHE in Egyptian -- or might not. Research continues.
>- No characters that can be obtained by using a different font with existing
>characters and have no semantic difference from the existing characters.
Such as?
>- No proposals to rename existing characters. (But a clarifying note
>might be added.)
This IS a rule.
>- No proposals to reposition existing characters, e.g. so they sort better.
This IS a rule.
>- No proposals for a newly invented character since putting it in the
>standard would help promote its use. (Significant usage must come first.)
We did encode the GREEK KAI SYMBOL, and when I proposed it, I hoped
that it would promote its use. Why? Because I saw a lot of
hand-painted signage in Greece which used it, but machine-printed
signage which used the AMPERSAND instead. I thought that was pretty
unfortunate.
But I DIDN'T invent it. It is centuries old!
Playing devil's advocate here, just a bit.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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