From: James Kass (jameskass@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Sep 22 2004 - 21:33:34 CDT
Mark E. Shoulson wrote,
> >But, I'm still curious about COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE. As it
> >stands, users can generate plain text ordered lists and so forth
> >using encircled letters and digits, as long as they are using Latin,
> >Hangul, or Katakana. But, they can't if they are users of other
> >scripts like Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Bengali, ... unless the COMBINING
> >ENCLOSING CIRCLE is considered valid for this purpose.
> >
> Is there any reason it can't? I thought that was what it was for: it
> combines by enclosing the previous character. What does it do, if not that?
Yes, that's exactly what COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE is supposed
to do, per TUS 4.0 page 188.
But, I've gotten various objections to this in the past, including,
'... those combining marks are only supposed to be used on *symbols*'.
And, as Asmus Freytag cautioned on 2004/09/20,
> In other words, you would like to treat this as a mandatory ligature.
>
> To make this work in interchange, we need to get the buy-in from enough
> platform, application and font vendors that they want to support this and
> similar characters in that way (and fix their products where necessary).
Exactly.
Asmus Freytag also wrote on 2004/09/21,
>>The Standard notes for U+2139 that it is intended for use with 20DD.
>
>I regard this as one of the 'still-born' parts of Unicode. I think
>there are complexities in the use of enclosing marks that people were
>not realizing. I see a certain amount of caution in the UTC nowadays
>when it comes to using 20DD.
It is this caution, expressed here and previously on this list and other
lists, which is making me cautious.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting this? Maybe this caution is only for symbols
like the Saudi Arabian Copyright Sign, and not for the generic use of
such combining marks for ordered lists and the like?
If so, then the Saudi Arabian Copyright Sign should be proposed as a
separate character and Michael Tiemann's "creative commons" symbol
might best be encoded as "c" + ZWJ + "c" + COMBINING ENCLOSING
CIRCLE. (In which case specialty fonts and a good rendering engine
would be needed in order to *display* the creative commons symbol
in plain text just like good fonts and decent font engines would be
needed in order to display enclosed Bengali characters in plain text
ordered lists.)
(By the way, U+2139 plus U+20DD displays just fine here... ℹ⃝ ... as long
as it has a space in front of it.)
Best regards,
James Kass
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