From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2011 - 12:37:03 CST
Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:
>> If some or all of the webdings glyphs were to become encoded
>> into regular Unicode, would that only be possible with the explicit
>> intellectual property rights permission of Microsoft?
>
> Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. Microsoft would not likely make IP claims over the concept of PARK SYMBOL. The use of a specific glyph is a different matter, but has no bearing on the encoding of an abstract character concept.
The way I read William's comment was that some of the Dings (in
particular the Windows logo at 0xFF in Wingdings) might be considered
analogous to the Apple logo, which is famously not in Unicode due to
Apple's IP objections. The word "likely" does leave some doubt.
I would assume all of the characters in these four sets, even the more
detailed drawings in Webdings like the park, would be treated for
encoding purposes as abstract symbols, just like the emoji. For
example, the cat encoded at 0xF6 in Webdings might not necessarily be
sitting up or facing right. The arrows in Wingdings 3 should probably
be named in a way that suggests their visual difference from other
arrows, and most implementations would probably use glyphs similar to
the Wingdings 3 glyphs, but even this is not guaranteed; the length of
the arrow at 0xA5, say, is not normative.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
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