From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sat Aug 27 2005 - 12:50:21 CDT
On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Neelesh Bodas wrote:
> As per unicode std. says, it is the "universal character encoding
> standard used for representation of text for computer processing".
> However what surprises me is that it includes a lot many symbols far
> far beyond what I would expect. For example, it contains all symbols
> used in music, card-game, rangoli, chess , trafic symbols and
> thousands of other categories.
Some of them puzzle me too, but some of them have regular use in
texts. A bridge columnist may well write "in this contract of
4H, the lead was S8" using suit symbols in place of "H" and "S".
I would call this normal use in text. Although the suit symbols
are iconic in the sense that they imitate the symbols printed on the
cards, they do not just refer to those printed symbols. Instead, they
denote the suits themselves.
On the other hand, I've never seen traffic signs in text (i.e., as
characters or character-like images within running text, as opposite to
being shown as illustrations associated with text). But I guess the
history of coding or not coding symbols in Unicode is complex and
may involve oddities and compromises.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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