On Tuesday 29 May 2012, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> Everyone and his brother can decree a currency symbol, too, or some other symbol.
I disagree with that statement on the basis that the word decree implies having the force of law.
Certainly, anyone can invent a new symbol and can assign a meaning to that symbol if he or she so chooses.
Indeed, in the United Kingdom and some other countries, he or she can, within the general legal restrictions on what may be lawfully published, publish that symbol and the meaning.
In the United Kingdom, I have invented various symbols and meanings and I have published them in electronic format on the web.
I publish the documents in Portable Document Format, known as pdf format, by using the Serif PagePlus desktop publishing software application together with fonts that I have made using the FontCreator software application.
I have deposited a copy of the published electronic document with the British Library and received an electronic receipt (in the form of an email) for the deposited item. One needs to ask in the covering email for a receipt when sending the item for deposit as an attachment to the email.
I have deposited pdf documents, png graphics and TTF fonts with the British Library.
There is some information about such voluntary deposit of pure electronic publications within the following web page.
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/legaldep/index.html
> Surely it makes sense to acknowledge that some large community is going to use a new symbol, even in text, and encode it in Unicode. We can just hope that people realize that this won’t magically make it “work.” It’s just a small technicality that lets implementors start using an assigned code point, instead of Private Use codepoints or, worse still, codepoints assigned to other characters.
Well, it could, I suppose, be regarded as a small technicality if it is done and nobody outside of the community of typographers and software implementers notices.
If it were not done and, as a result of inconsistent encodings for a particular currency symbol in documents, at some future time there were to be chaos somewhere because a data file had been sent from one bank to another bank and the two banks were using incompatible encodings for a particular currency symbol, then it would not be a small technicality, yet perhaps the first item on the television news bulletin.
> In software design, this is a minor detail, effectively the value of one parameter.
Well, it might seem a minor detail whether one value or another is put in a piece of software, yet the difference in result could be enormous!
It may be just one parameter, yet huge amounts of data files could be analysed by comparing a character in a data file with that one parameter; analysed for years into the future.
> So what’s disturbing here is the apparently political move of giving one particular symbol a high priority in a manner that affects the whole process. The process of adopting new characters to Unicode may be slow, but I guess there are reasons behind this. It’s disproportionate to regard a currency symbol as an emergency case.
Well, I feel that it is entirely proportionate to regard encoding a new currency symbol as an urgent question. It is a matter of planning for every possibility that there be a contingency plan, at the present time, that one or more new currency symbols can be encoded into regular Unicode promptly if one or more new currencies become initiated in some very short time scale if one or more countries leave the Eurozone.
> It sets a questionable precedent.
Well, maybe a precedent for currency symbols, yet not for other symbols, such as those that I have designed.
William Overington
29 May 2012
Received on Tue May 29 2012 - 12:26:11 CDT
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