Questions about U+203C DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK and other chars contained in subset MES-2 of ISO 10646

From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Thu Dec 20 2007 - 03:58:13 CST

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    The characters
     U+203C DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK
     U+2017 DOUBLE LOW LINE
     U+203E OVERLINE
     U+21A8 UP DOWN ARROW WITH BASE
     U+221F RIGHT ANGLE
     U+2302 HOUSE
     U+2310 REVERSED NOT SIGN, annotated as "beginning of line"
    are contained in the Unicode subset "collection 282 MES-2"
    (Multilingual European Subset) as specified in ISO/IEC 10646.

    I did not find any information of the history and purpose of MES-2.
    (does anybody have a hint?)
    I suspect that some character sets like IBM PC code page 437 were
    merged in that standard (which contains several characters from the
    list above).

    My questions:
    Is there any need or evidence for usage of U+203C DOUBLE EXCLAMATION
    MARK within Latin script context (e.g. because a specific font design
    is necessary which is different from a sequence of two exclamation
    marks U+0021?

    Is there any need or evidence for usage of the other characters of the
    list where the context is not terminal or block graphic specific?

    (My question is related to my posting "[OT] character collection for an
     international keyboard layout (ISO/IEC 9995-2 and 9995-3)" from
     2007-12-19.
     I presume that there is no need to include the listed characters in a
     keyboard layout design (even when the attempt succeeds to integrate a
     relative large symbol set in a keyboard layout), but I want to know
     if I am wrong with this.)

    Any information is appreciated. Thank you.

    - Karl Pentzlin

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