From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2011 - 15:00:47 CST
On 1 Apr 2011, at 21:27, Julian Bradfield wrote:
> (1) The supposed existing characters are characters encoded for
> round-trip compatibility with KS X 1001. They are not heraldic
> hatching characters, which don't exist and never have done.
Nevertheless, they are boxes with hatches in them, and the existing set covers the main tinctures excepting Or.
> (2) Your proposal contains no evidence of plain text use. When I
> mentioned this elsewhere, you claimed that these characters were
> used in plain text - but as all your excerpts show, they
> aren't. The patterns are used in diagrams and tables, in the same
> way that any pattern can appear in a diagram or table, as for
> example on a map or on the legend of a map.
The standard now encodes many, many characters which are used in map legends and similar contexts. Many of these were emoji characters, or were added when emoji characters were added (in order to fill out notional sets).
I think there is no proscription on the UCS on map legend text as being automatically considered not to be text.
Even if the geometric shape characters were encoded for round-trip compatibility with KS X 1001, that does not prevent anyone from using them as geometric shapes with hatching patterns in them, whatever those same characters were used for in KS X 1001. Unicode 5.0 said:
"The hatched and cross-hatched squares at U+25A4..U+25A9 are derived from the Korean national standard (KS X 1001), in which they were probably intended as representations of fill patterns."
Fine. And representations of fill patterns are useful, as we know from heraldic hatching and from descriptions of how hatching patterns are used. In fact heraldic hatching patterns were used in a number of emoji glyphs which had been named for various colours. According to the Wikipedia
> The basic Petra Sancta system was adopted in the modern world by industrial engineers as a standard system of colors and hatch patterns for use in planning factories and material handling systems.[3]
I don't think it is a mistake to add these additional geometric symbols.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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