Re: Acquiring DIS 10646

From: Sean Leonard <lists+unicode_at_seantek.com>
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2015 05:30:53 -0700

On 10/3/2015 12:28 PM, Asmus Freytag (t) wrote:
> On 10/3/2015 8:15 AM, Sean Leonard wrote:
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Well, "DIS 10646" is the Draft International Standard, particularly
>> Draft 1, from ~1990 or ~1991. (Sometimes it might have been called
>> 10646.1.) Therefore it would likely only be in print form (or printed
>> and scanned form). It's pretty old. What I understand is that Draft 1
>> got shot down because it was at variance with the nascent Unicode
>> effort; Draft 2 was eventually adopted as ISO 10646:1993, and is
>> equivalent to Unicode 1.1. (10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5 to 7 =
>> Unicode 2.0.)
>
> Sean,
>
> you never explained your specific interest in this matter. Personal
> curiosity? An attempt to write the definite history of character encoding?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away....

(Okay it really was not that long ago, and it was pretty close at hand
since it was on this list)

I proposed adding C1 Control Pictures to Unicode.
<http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2011-m08/0047.html> I am
resurrecting that effort, but more slowly this time, with more research
and input from implementers. The requirement is that all glyphs for
U+0000 - U+00FF be graphically distinct.

Debuggers used to do this by referencing the graphemes in the hardware
code page, such as Code Page 437, but we have come a long way from 1981,
so displaying ♣ for 0x05 does not make much modern sense. Merely
substituting one of the other legacy code pages in for 0x80 - 0x9F does
not make sense either. The characters of Code Page 437 overlap with
U+00A0 - U+00FF in that range, for example. (Windows-1252 is somewhat
more defensible, but Windows-1252 has 5 unassigned code points so it
would be incomplete.)

Sean
Received on Sun Oct 04 2015 - 07:32:44 CDT

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