Re: Pre-1923 characters?

From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 23:23:53 EST

  • Next message: Tom Gewecke: "Byzantine Musical Symbols Questions"

    > > Not safe for what? I've come across six characters that
    weren't in
    > > Unicode at all.
     
    As a side note, for Everson, all of which I've reported to
    this list before.
     
    > Then I'm puzzled as to the purpose of this proposed subset.
     
    Right now, we accept Latin-1, because the guy who created it
    didn't think about character sets at all, with various markup
    systems for other Latin characters and transliterated Greek
    outside of Latin-1, and no way to handle anything outside that
    range. We have a selector, so if you're working with a standard
    American keyboard at a library, you can still input the
    Latin-1 and Greek characters. This also works well if you don't
    want to mess with your system at home.
     
    I'd like to break down the sections of Unicode into similar
    size panels (less then 96 characters) that can be swapped
    in and out. If we decompose characters, Latin-1 and Extended-A
    can be stuffed in one panel, replacing the Latin-1 panel we
    currently have. It would be nice to stuff the rest of Latin
    in one panel.
     
    > Books before 1923, especially scholarly books concerned with
    language or
    > mathematics and logic, might contain almost any character
    currently
    > coded in Unicode as well as characters not currently coded in
    Unicode
    > including idiosyncratic characters that will never be encoded
    in
    > Unicode. They are also likely to contain characters from
    non-Latin
    > scripts and many symbols.
     
    Math is moot right now; we're using TeX. Non-Latin is moot,
    because that's handled by other panels, and with the exception
    of Greek, is probably going to get passed off to relative
    experts. Some selection of symbols will find its way into
    a panel.
      
    > Why prescribe a closed subset?
     
    I'm not. I'm creating a useful tool. If you want to open
    Character Map and insert characters, then you are welcome
    to do so. But some can't use that tool (i.e. library
    computers), and many want something more convienant and
    localized to what they'll encounter.

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