From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 14 2003 - 08:56:10 EST
Michael Everson wrote:
> The following story was forwarded to me. The "offending" characters
> in question are, I take it, the left-facing and right-facing swastika
> symbols, often used in Tibetan, found among the Chinese ideographs at
> U+534D (yung-drung-chi-khor) and U+5350 (yung-drung-nang-khor).
> I hope that this story is not true.
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=582&e=1
> &u=/nm/20031212/wr_nm/tech_microsoft_swastika_dc
I find nothnig wrong in proposing a font which does not have these symbols
for use in European scripts, where the occurence of the symbol is almost
always associated to the Nazi's party, but I think it would be wrong to
remove them from fonts designed for Asian markets that need it to represent
their script, in a context where such association is not self-evident.
So as long as Microsoft puts the symbols in Asian fonts to support Asian
character sets containing the khor symbol, there won't be problems if
Microsoft creates a purged version of the generic-purpose "Bookshelf Symbol
7" font.
May be the Unicode name should not be swastika but a transliteration of an
Asian name (Tibetan, Chinese Pinyin...), and all references to "swastika"
(included in code charts, and the name index) removed if they ever occur
somewhere in the standard or in a proposal.
However there's still a problem with the ancient scandinavian usage: it's
not clear that the symbol would only fit in Asian fonts. However the symbols
could be present in fonts made to represent old European scripts such as
Runic, even if they have been used in translations to Roman-Latin or
Church-Latin of these texts, with a Latin or Gothic script, or even in some
other Uralic languages.
However, I think that Microsoft would be more productive by completing its
current support for the Latin script, notably with African languages, that
really want now access to their characters in a font that ultimately will be
mapped in a new coming ISO8859 page, which will be supported as well in
Windows by a corresponding Windows-125x codepage for Pan-Sahelian languages,
as well as a usable keyboard layout for them, backed on a standard French or
Latin-Arabic keyboard used in these African countries (may be also on an
English keyboard?). For now African languages are only representable on
Windows with "Arial Unicode MS" which is limited by its Office licence.
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