Re: Synthetic scripts (was: Re: Private Use Agreements and Unapproved Characters)

From: Sampo Syreeni (decoy@iki.fi)
Date: Sat Mar 16 2002 - 11:28:08 EST


On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote:

>This is an opinion by liguists but the problem is the government takes
>it otherwise.

I'd say this is fairly similar to the distinction between generic words
and specific copyrighted, stylistic variants of such names. E.g. in the
eyes of law, "Nokia" is the name of a Finnish city, while the same word
printed in blue-on-white in a certain sans-serif font is something you'd
want to be *very* careful with. This does not mean that the characters
aren't the same, and that Unicode should encode those character variants.

>Right. I don't know where the line should be drawn either. But the
>bottom line is that the name should be considered different characters,
>not different variation of the same character because this directory
>bounds to legal documents. I want, ok, hope, ok, wish Unicode to be
>encode legal documents in plain text.

I suspect there are lots of legal documents, like those quoting patent
applications, which simply cannot be encoded as such. Even when no Han
characters are present.

>But when it comes to allocating new character set, ISO-2022 wins because
>the authority has to authorize only escape sequence to the new character
>set and leave the rest up to the user.

Oh? How about Unicode's largish set of private use characters, with highly
efficient informal "allocation" procedures along the lines of the
Conscript Registry?

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2



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