Re: status of Khmer and Ethiopic

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Nov 19 1997 - 19:34:02 EST


Siobhán Harper-Jones asked about Khmer and Ethiopic.

Ethiopic is more or less finalized. There may be a problem
with a couple of the glyph shapes, but very little chance
that anything will move or be removed before publication.
ISO Stage 5 is quite far along in the ISO process. There
is a big "Caution" on the table on the web site, but the
degree of risk for early implementers is quite small.

Khmer is still in the debating stage. There are two
significantly different ways of encoding the subscript
forms in the Khmer script, and until this debate is
worked through, final encoding would be premature. This
does not mean that there is no progress on encoding this
script--only that the proposals before the Unicode Technical
Committee and the ISO committee still require more work
before it would make sense to publish an earler
adopter's chart.

--Ken

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> Hello,
>
> I am consulting on a project for a medical center which wants to publish
> health education materials on the Web in various languages of Seattle-area
> refugee communities. I'd appreciate any information that you could provide
> me on the status of Khmer and Ethiopic.
>
> Khmer is found on the Unicode site with a 1992 proposal under a header
> which
> states:
>
> >>The following modern scripts are currently not supported in Unicode.
>>Some of them have been codified and accepted for inclusion in a future
>>version of the standard.
> >>Extensions to Unicode (and ISO/IEC 10646) which will address the needs
> of
>> these scripts are being developed and evaluated by both the Unicode
Technical
>> Committee and by ISO JTC1/SC2/WG2.

> Does that mean that no further action is being taken on Khmer at present?
> The fact that is is not found under _Proposed Unicode Characters_ seems to
> indicate so. Is there a way to revive the request, or is it still in the
> pipeline at all?
>
> Ethiopic (Amharic, Tigrinye, etc.) was apparently accepted on 96-Mar-06
> and
> given Stage 5 status on 97-Ju1-04, according to the Unicode site. I
> understand the caveat that encoding these points in a font is at our own
> risk, but is there an ETA on final approval/publication? If that is still
> a
> long way off in the future, maybe it makes sense to go ahead with our
> preliminary project efforts, and risk later reassignments.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Siobhán Harper-Jones

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