Re: Xiangqi Game Symbols (was Re: Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation)

From: Garth Wallace via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 14:58:36 +0000

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 2:13 AM Andrew West <andrewcwest_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12 April 2017 at 05:12, Garth Wallace via Unicode
> <unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:
> >
> > Later Xiangqi proposals by Andrew West focused on
> > the circled ideographs and did not pursue new diagram drawing characters,
> > and were eventually successful.
>
> My Xiangqi proposal
> (http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16255-n4748-xiangqi.pdf) proposed a
> minimal set of logical game pieces for Xiangqi/Janggi, regardless of
> shape (circular or octagonal) or design (traditional characters,
> simplified characters, cursive characters, or pictures) which I
> consider a font design issue, and explicitly did not seek to encode
> circled ideographs. My proposal was rejected, and a different proposal
> by Michael Everson
> (http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16270-n4766-xiangqi.pdf) to encode
> all circled ideographs and negative circled ideographs attested in
> Xiangqi game diagrams was accepted instead.
>

Ah, I misremembered, sorry.

>
> The accepted proposal for circled ideographs is a glyph encoding model
> not a character encoding model as for other game symbols (Chess,
> Dominos, Mahjong, Playing Cards, etc.), and in my opinion it is a very
> bad model for several reasons. It makes the interchange of Xiangqi
> game data and game diagrams problematic; it hinders normal text
> processing operations on Xiangqi game pieces (for example, to search
> for a red horse piece you have to search for three different
> characters); and in modern computer usage Xiangqi game pieces may not
> be represented as simple circled ideographs, but may be coloured
> designs showing characters or images. It is also very likely that
> vendors will want to produce emoji versions of Xiangqi pieces, and
> these could not reasonably be considered to be glyph variants of
> circled ideographs. There has been some negative feedback on the
> circled ideographs model on the internet, and I believe that Michael
> has now been convinced that this model is wrong, and should be
> replaced by a model using logical game pieces.
>
> Andrew

So has that proposal been retracted now?

>
>
Received on Wed Apr 12 2017 - 09:59:15 CDT

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