Re: NamesList, Code Charts, ISO/IEC 10646

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2015 19:32:37 +0200

2015-05-04 18:42 GMT+02:00 Richard Wordingham <
richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>:

> > No way to pack all the information into the name, and even character
> > properties aren't covering all of them.
>
> Unfortunately, when choosing a character from a character picker, the
> most help one is likely to get is the character name. The name is
> actually quite useful when the glyph is not as one expects or the
> distinguishing features are not readily visible.
>

Character pickers are applications and not in scope of the standard itself.
It's up to the developers of these applications to provide the necessary
localisations according to the expectations of their users for a particular
language, script, and/or country/region or even dialectal variant.

You cannot have a single normative character name (in fact not really a
name, but a technical identifier) that will match all users expectations in
all cultures. So the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 have only chosen to use and
publich a single stable identifier throughout the standardization process;
even if it is bad, it will be kept. These names are not designed to be even
suitable for all English users (and just consider how CJK sinograms are
named, they are not suitable for anyone...).

There are open projects (outside Unicode and even outside CLDR itself) to
provide common character names in various locales.
Received on Mon May 04 2015 - 12:33:57 CDT

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