Re: North Korean fonts

From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Jul 02 2009 - 18:39:20 CDT

  • Next message: John H. Jenkins: "Re: North Korean fonts"

    On Jul 2, 2009, at 4:06 PM, William J Poser wrote:

    > There was a point to my comment about North Korean fonts,
    > which is that the reason that North Korea has not supplied
    > fonts is probably the fact that it just doesn't participate
    > in international organizations like Unicode.

    It participated in the IRG for some time, pushing very hard to get
    mappings to its standards into the Universal Character Set. They were
    most anxious and provided all kinds of mapping tables to both the IRG
    and me directly. Fonts were another matter, but this was also before
    WG2, the UTC, and the Rapporteur started hitting people over the head
    very hard on the matter of fonts. (I'm still not sure if they
    provided printed copies of their standards.)

    > It is unlikely
    > that it regards its fonts as state secrets or even as trade
    > secrets. North Korea would probably provide fonts if someone
    > of sufficient authority saw an advantage to it. The question is
    > what would interest them that is on the one hand affordable and
    > on the other hand could be legally and ethically provided.
    >

    At this point, the IRG has lost all contact with North Korea. At the
    HK meeting last month, the Rapporteur noted that she gets no responses
    to the emails she sends them. The IRG agreed to pull North Korea's
    characters from Extension E because they're not involving themselves
    in the process and providing the data we've been repeatedly asking for.

    Speculating on why they've withdrawn or what we can do to coax them
    back into participation is pointless, IMHO, because the only
    meaningful action that the standards community can take is to stop
    forwarding integration of their standards until they choose to involve
    themselves as they did the first time. They know where we are.

    =====
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com



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