Re: help needed with adding new character

From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 13:17:56 EST

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    Jon Wilson scripsit:

    > PEACE SYMBOL, YIN YANG and HAMMER AND SICKLE are represented in Unicode.
    > The first and third are even logos for specific organisations (CND and
    > various communist governements).

    PEACE SYMBOL, as its name indicates, has a considerably wider scope
    than nuclear disarmament, at least in the U.S. Symbols as such are
    not excluded from Unicode, and logos may be representable there if they
    constitute letters (IIRC, Xerox actually had a company font with only
    the four glyphs required to write their logo) or known symbols. But they
    have to be symbols that commonly appear with or interact with text.

    In addition, the fact (arguendo) that something dubious was done in the
    past is no argument for doing it again.

    > If there is recorded discussion as to why these characters are included,
    > and others not, then I would be interested in reading it.

    I'm not enough of a Unicode old fart to comment on this.

    > >>This character has a distinct history and meaning, and I believe it to
    > >>be suitable for inclusion in Unicode as a separate character from
    > >>CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A.
    > >
    > >That argument would be good if the character were Han, but it is not.
    >
    > Do I understand you to be saying a character cannot be ideographic
    > merely because it is based on a western letter?

    "Ideographic" is a vexed term, and leads to bad reasoning, so let's not use it.
    I mean that if two Han characters are distinct in history and meaning (or
    even just in abstract shape), they are not unified in Unicode; but this argument
    is insufficient outside the domain of Han characters. There is little connection
    between the up and down arrows as used by linguists vs. chemists, but we
    encode only one set of arrows nevertheless. 

    -- 
"You know, you haven't stopped talking          John Cowan
since I came here. You must have been           http://www.reutershealth.com
vaccinated with a phonograph needle."           jcowan@reutershealth.com
        --Rufus T. Firefly                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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