Re: Bantu click letters

From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 20:48:55 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Bantu click letters"

    There are two reasons we might not encode a particular image as a character. I
    had said:

    >Many images are not appropriate for use in plain text, or have too
    small a user community.

    That is, you need to have something that is appropriate for use in plain text
    *and* have a significant user community. As far as I have seen from the email,
    there is no real evidence for a user community. If a character only occurs in a
    couple of works, means there is simply not the utility in encoding it; PUA is
    the right choice. There is a much larger set of documents containing the Prince
    icon, but we don't want to encode that either!

    Mark
    __________________________________
    http://www.macchiato.com
    ► शिष्यादिच्छेत्पराजयम् ◄

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
    To: <unicode@unicode.org>
    Sent: Thu, 2004 Jun 10 17:00
    Subject: Re: Bantu click letters

    > At 15:34 -0700 2004-06-10, Mark Davis wrote:
    > >This argument does not hold water. Simply because some images appear
    > >in some documents does not mean that they automatically should be
    > >represented as encoded characters. Many images are not appropriate
    > >for use in plain text, or have too small a user community. They
    > >should be represented as private use characters, or as literal
    > >images. The Prince glyph, on-beyond-zebra characters, the images on
    > >images on http://www.aperfectworld.org/animals.htm, etc. are in
    > >quite a number of documents, but that doesn't mean that any of them
    > >necessarily qualify as characters for encoding.
    >
    > Mark, come on. Doke's phonetic transcription of !Xung is a set of
    > explicit glyphs representing specific sounds, indeed more precisely
    > than IPA allows (I don't think IPA specifies a representation for
    > retroflex clicks). Apart from the question whether or not the
    > characters are important enough for people to want to be able to
    > interchange them as encoded UCS characters (which is stipulated as a
    > question), it's just not on to say that these are the same kinds of
    > things as Prince's logo or the Seussian extensions.
    > --
    > Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
    >
    >



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