Re: Encoding Personal Use Ideographs

From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2007 - 03:29:58 CST

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    ZWJ requests a more joined form from the rendering system
    if one is available.

    Consider "ASSOCIATED PRESS SYMBOL", which is essentially a
    typographic ligature of "A" and "P".

    Would inserting a ZWJ between an "A" and a "P" in order to
    get a ligature of "AP" to use for representing that symbol
    in plain text be a Bad Thing?

    Quoting from The Los Angeles Times, 1936/03/08,

         "COLORADO SPRINGS (Colo.)
         March 7. (A‍P)—Former President
         Hoover charged tonight the New
         Deal had laid groundwork for an
         ever-increasing tax burden, yet
         failed in the “outstanding” govern-
         mental job of re-employing the job-
         less."

    As I type this, I expect to be the only person here whose
    system can display that AP symbol. If the system can't
    render a more joined form of A+P, then the display would
    probably just show (AP).

    If the AP SYMBOL were proposed, would it be rejected
    because it can already be expressed in Unicode using ZWJ?
    In other words, rejected because it's a ligature. Or, might
    it be viewed as more of a logo than a symbol, and rejected
    on that basis?

    Would it be better to use the PUA for this type of symbol?
    ( Some of us can do this now... )
    ( March 7. ()—Former President )
    (But not all of us see the intended symbol there.)

    Whether ASSOCIATED PRESS SYMBOL is ever encoded, it
    isn't as of this writing. I wanted to electronically reproduce
    a paragraph of text, as true to the original as possible.

    If using ZWJ to form a ligature of A+P is acceptable, then
    how about using ZWJ to form a more joined rendering of
    two CJK ideographs? Is that too much of a leap?

    The attached graphic shows two different working (on
    my system) ZWJ substitutions in a plain text editor.

    Also, consider western brands which are essentially logos.
    "Bar X" could be represented in plain text as "X̅". But
    many brands are letter-like symbols which are joined
    forms of Latin letters. Would ZWJ be O.K. for combined
    or connected brands?

    http://www.tbonebrands.com/brand_samples.htm

    Best regards,

    James Kass



    zwj_examples.png

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