Re: Ideographic Description Characters

From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 11:04:29 EST

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    On Dec 8, 2003, at 3:15 AM, Andrew C. West wrote:

    > On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 11:25:01 -0700, Tom Gewecke wrote:
    >>
    >> Can anyone tell me whether ideographic description characters are ever
    >> actually used?
    >
    > Well, I use them on a couple of my web pages to describe unencoded
    > ideographs
    > (try viewing
    > http://uk.geocities.com/BabelStone1357/Alphabets/Zhuang.html with
    > Code2000), but I can't recall ever having seen them used elsewhere.
    >

    I've seen them used for analytical and pedagogical purposes, as well as
    to send descriptions of unencoded ideographs around in email (v.
    infra).

    The IRG is attempting to set up a database of existing ideographs using
    IDSs (strictly speaking, this is a no-no, but they understand that).
    This will help in the analysis of submitted ideographs and speed up the
    process of encoding.

    >> I recently ran into a Han (Vietnamese Nôm) character
    >> which does not seem to be encoded yet, "slice" radical on left and
    >> "heart" radical on right, and was wondering whether it would make
    >> practical sense to encode this as U+2FF1, U+2F5A, U+2F3C (
    > ⿰⽚⼼).
    >
    > Remember IDCs *describe* ideographs, they are not used to *encode*
    > them.

    C'est vrai. At the same time, if you've got a reliable source for the
    character, you can send it on to Unicode to include in its next
    proposal for additions. (FWIW, ⿰⽚⼼ has already been submitted by
    Vietnam for Extension C1.)

    ========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/



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