Re: Encoding Personal Use Ideographs

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 04 2007 - 16:38:01 CST

  • Next message: John H. Jenkins: "Re: Encoding Personal Use Ideographs"

    On 04/11/2007, John H. Jenkins <jenkins@apple.com> wrote:
    > I swore I wasn't going to post anything more to the threads on this
    > topic, but since James is a rational and reasonable human being, I'll
    > break my vow.

    I wasn't either, but since I'm neither as rational nor as reasonable
    as James is I'll break my vow as well.

    > 1) IDSs are inadequate to provide acceptable rendering;

    Not if they are used to render specific [as yet] unencoded characters
    for which a font has precomposed glyphs.

    > 2) Normalization of IDSs would be necessary for operations such as
    > searching and sorting and is an absolute nightmare; and

    Yes, but my understanding is that James is not seeking to introduce a
    general-purpose compositional model for the Han script, but is simply
    exploring the possibility of using IDS sequences to represent specific
    [as yet] unencoded characters is a manner that TUS
    <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch12.pdf> says is valid
    and which learned members of this list have confirmed is acceptable.

    > 3) It is generally felt that making up *new* ideographs is a Bad Thing
    > and ought not be encouraged.

    I agree, but where would the Han script be if no-one ever created a
    new character or two?

    > I won't say that the UTC or WG2 will absolutely oppose any and all
    > compositional models for Han, *but* the bar is very high indeed. This
    > approach has been bruited in Unicode pretty much since the beginning,
    > and the UTC is well aware of the practical problems involved. A
    > compositional model won't fly in the UTC unless these problems are
    > addressed; for all practical intents and purposes, the UTC would
    > require an actual implementation, at the very least.

    I hope I'm not the only one here who is now totally confused. Why
    should it be any business whatsoever of the UTC if James as a
    respected font designer wants to map specific IDS sequences to
    precomposed glyphs in his fonts or even if he or anyone else decides
    to create a font that composes IDS sequences into unitary glyphs on
    the fly ? When the standard already says, in quite some detail, that
    this is acceptable behaviour why should anyone need to go running cap
    in hand to the UTC to get their permission to do so ?

    I'm half tempted to drop everything else I am doing and take up your
    challenge to produce an "implementation" (whatever that means in this
    context), despite the fact that we poor Windows users are stymied by a
    rendering engine (aka Uniscribe) that only allows IDS sequences that
    comprise IDC characters and CJK radicals, but not IDC characters and
    CJK unified ideographs and/or CJK radicals as the Unicode standard
    specifies.

    Andrew (aka U+2FF4 U+4E95 U+86D9> ⿴井蛙)



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