RE: Why blackletter letters?

Yucca asked:

> As far as I can see, the document summarizes an agreement in an ad hoc
> meeting. So it’s not late at all to raise objections, is it?

It is way, way, waaay too late to raise objections for these two.

Those characters are *published* in ISO/IEC 10646:2011 Amendment 1.

They were initially approved by WG2 on June 9, 2011, on the basis
of the ad hoc report noted already (WG2 N4106 = L2/11-240).

The UTC did its own pro forma approval on August 5, 2011, to stay in
synch with the WG2 approvals.

Those characters (along with a thousand others) went through two rounds
of international balloting during late 2011 and early 2012, and those were
ballots were the only chances to pull back or modify the approvals. Nobody objected
during that balloting, and here we are.

For those on the Unicode list who are confused about what is approved (and
published) versus what is still under consideration and subject to
possible modifications (or even removal), it is important to keep in
mind that the Unicode Standard right now is considerably behind the
publication schedule for ISO/IEC 10646 amendments, largely because
of the intervening publications of Unicode 6.2 (and the imminent
Unicode 6.3), which were devoted to a very few urgently needed
characters and to significant overhauls of some of the Unicode Standard
Annexes (including a major rework of bidi). This leaves us with a very
large backlog (2833 characters, to be precise), which are already
finalized, but waiting until we can get Unicode 7.0 published
sometime next year.

If you want to have an impact on what is under consideration and
still available for changes, please refer to the Unicode *pipeline* page:

http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html

Items listed there in green are still under ballot in ISO, while items
listed in yellow are not yet in ballot in ISO. For those, input is still
useful.

If the entry is listed in white, forget it. Those items are already too late
to impact the character name or code point for.

--Ken
Received on Tue Sep 10 2013 - 13:35:47 CDT