Michael Everson said in reply to me
> >- No scripts with a limited body of text in existance. (No need to exchange
> >or analyse on computer.) E.g. Phaistos disk script
> If the Phaistos disk were bilingual and deciphered, it could be added
> even if there were only one document. Why not?
I have the impression that there is a philosophy that the standard is for
storing text on a computer for the purposes of processing and interchange
and should avoid being cluttered with things that aren't needed. This seems
to have precedence over covering all the important scripts.
In the case of the Phaistos disk the length of text is so short that there
seems little benefit in storing the plain characters even if it had text in
another language too. Surely an image of the original or an accurate drawing
is better at communicating the content and gives more of a feel for the disk
than just the characters?
Personally I would be happy to see this particular script in the standard.
Indeed scripts that appear on the cover of the Unicode book or CD have a
rather poor record of appearing inside. (The Greek from the Rosetta stone is
there and I presume the KangXi dictionary page too as of 3.1, although I
don't read CJK.)
> >- No symbols that are just a picture of something with no other meaning e.g.
> >a dog. (These tend not to have a fixed conventional form.)
> For instance, Blissymbols has a dog symbol in it. Granted,
> Blissymbols is a separate script so maybe that isn't so convincing.
> But what if a series of hotel symbols were added, with things like NO
> SMOKING, NO DOGS, GUIDE DOGS appeared? Those do have some sort of
> real semantic even though the glyphs may vary.
Agreed although as you say there is a semantic involved. Interestingly in
the NO... cases the semantic is provided by the circle with the diagonal
line U+20E0. So there might be a desire to put a cigarette symbol into the
standard (which is just a picture) so it could be granted a semantic by
being combined with U+20E0. (In practise I doubt these symbols are used in
running text so there is little call for them. Come to think of it, the
colours involved are often standardised so a graphic would be better,
discounting another thread.)
> >- No archaic styles of existing characters. E.g. dotless j.
> There are some archaic characters already encoded, and N'Ko is going
> to have two of them. Probably.
I was thinking of same character different style of writing it. In other
words easily done with a font change. (The mathematical styles are a special
case because each style is effectively a different set of characters with
there own meaning.) A character that used to be used but is no longer is
perfectly legitimate.
> >- No control codes for fancy text. E.g. begin bold
> We have BEGIN SLUR in Western Music already. Might have use for BEGIN
> and END CARTOUCHE in Egyptian -- or might not. Research continues.
I gave the example of bold because it doesn't change the essential meaning
of the text in a significant manner. In your examples there is meaning
involved; the cartouche is a determiner for a royal name for instance.
> >- No characters that can be obtained by using a different font with existing
> >characters and have no semantic difference from the existing characters.
> Such as?
Inclined Cyrillic Be. I have that in a font on my computer but I don't
expect Unicode to have a separate character for it.
Or (to my mind unfortunately) Greek letters in a Coptic style.
Regards,
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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