At 07:06 -0800 2002-03-13, Michael \(michka\) Kaplan wrote:
>But, devil's advocate -- since Unicode is an industrial consortium which
>must ultimately answer to its members (and whose representatives must
>ultimately answer to their superiors in terms of budgeting that $12,000!), I
>think it is entirely reasonable to look at rarely used scripts and fictional
>scripts (both of which member companies are unlikely to implement for
>reasons I doubt I need to go into here?) and categorize them a lower
>priority than that of scripts that are neither?
The JTC1 Member Bodies, however, do not represent an industrial
consortium. The goal of the Universal Character Set is to represent
all the world's writing systems.
>When specifically choosing between a rarely used script and a fictional
>script, the former is more appealing to me personally as I feel that there
>is a greater value to dealing with what is "real" first.
The users of Tengwar are, in fact, real users. Whether writing their
own languages in this script, or writing a poem in one of Tolkien's
invented languages in it (just as valid as writing poetry in
Esperanto), they're users. And they're numerous, too.
>I understand that the lines between fictional are rarely used are over
>blurry, and I am not suggesting anything as extreme as what you mention, but
>Unicode should be concerned about how people perceive it.
Agreed. But Tolkien's scripts are fairly easy to defend on scholarly
grounds. His manuscripts are studied and published, and c'mon,
everybody's seen the film.... ;-)
>And how those "higher ups" who approve the budget money to belong to
>Unicode perceive things like Tengwar (do any of the member companies
>plan to add locale information for Elvish regions, collation, fonts,
>or anything else?).
If accepted into the standard, collation information will certainly
go into the UCA and 14651 template.
Not that the "higher ups" are spending a lot of money on Old Italic
or Ogham or Tagbanwa either, right?
Often, whether a script is prioritized or not has to do with the
amount of reliable information we have about it, as a practical
matter.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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