Perhaps it was ignored from the beginning on, like Philippe Verdy reports that UTC ignored later demands, getting users upset.Current practice in electronic publishing was to use a non-breakable thin space, Philippe Verdy reports. Did that information come in somehow?
==> probably not in the early days. Y
==> for reasons given in another post, I tend to not give much
credit to these suggestions.
For one, many worthwhile additions / changes to Unicode depend on getting written up in proposal form and then championed by dedicated people willing to see through the process. Usually, Unicode has so many proposals to pick from that at each point there are more than can be immediately accommodated. There's no automatic response to even issues that are "known" to many people.
"Demands" don't mean a thing, formal proposals, presented and
then refined based on feedback from the committee is what puts
issues on the track of being resolved.
That leaves us with the question why it did so, downstream your statement that it was not what I ended up suspecting.
Does "Y" stand for the peace symbol?
==> No, my thumb sometimes touches the touchpad and flicks the cursor while I type. I don't always see where some character end up. Or, I start a sentence and the phone rings. Or any of a number of scenarios. Take your pick.
Did you also see typewriters with proportional advance width (and interchangeable type wheels)? That was the high end on the typewriter market. (Already mentioned these typewriters in a previous e‑mail.) Books typeset this way could use bold and (less easy) italic spans.
ISO 31-0 was published in 1992, perhaps too late for Unicode. It is normally understood that the thousands separator should not have the width of a digit. The allaged reason is security. Though on a typewriter, as you state, there is scarcely any other option. By that time, all computerized text was fixed width, Philippe Verdy reports. On-screen, I figure out, not in book print
==> much book printing was also done by photomechanically reproducing typescript at that time. Not everybody wanted to pay typesetters and digital typesetting wasn't as advanced. I actually did use a digital phototypesetter of the period a few years before I joined Unicode, so I know. It was more powerful than a typewriter, but not as powerful as TeX or later the Adobe products.
For one, you didn't typeset a page, only a column of text, and it required manual paste-up etc.
Yes, I definitely used an IBM Selectric for many years with interchangeable type wheels, but I don't remember using proportional spacing, although I've seen it in the kinds of "typescript" books I mentioned. Some had that crude approximation of typesetting.
When Unicode came out, that was no longer the state of the art as TeX and laser printers weren't limited that way.
However, the character sets from which Unicode was assembled (or which it had to match, effectively) were designed earlier - during those times. And we inherited some things (that needed to be supported so round-trip mapping of data was possible) but that weren't as well documented in their particulars.
I'm sure we'll eventually deprecate some and clean up others, like the Mongolian encoding (which also included some stuff that was encoded with an understanding that turned out less solid in retrospect than we had thought at the time).
Something the UTC tries very hard to avoid, but nobody is perfect. It's best therefore to try not to ascribe non-technical motives to any action or inaction of the UTC. What outsiders see is rarely what actually went down, and the real reasons for things tend to be much less interesting from an interpersonal or intercultural perspective. So best avoid that kind of topic altogether and never use it as basis for unfounded recriminations.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sat Jan 19 2019 - 02:43:11 CST