RE: What are the present criteria for the encoding of characters that have been fairly recently invented please?

William_J_G Overington <wjgo underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com>
wrote:

> What are the present criteria for the encoding of characters that have been fairly recently invented please? There seems to be a lack of clarity.

"Fairly recently invented" seems not to tell the full story with regard
to Wingdings. They have been shipped with Microsoft Windows for more
than 20 years, and many of them have seen extensive worldwide use in a
variety of applications as a result. They are not symbols that somebody
just came up with last week and showed around to his friends.

> For example, the criteria in relation to Wingdings and Webdings in the following document are not the same as that often stated on the Unicode mailing list for the encoding of characters that have been fairly recently invented: the mailing list conventional wisdom being that significant usage using a Private Use Area encoding must first have been achieved.
>
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4085.pdf
>
> quote
>
> Indicators for such benefit for the user can be:
> – Evidence of actual use.
> – Evidence of prevention of an otherwise probable actual use due to the lack of encoding.
> – Conformance with or compliance to another standard.
>
> end quote
>
> The concept of benefit to the user and the concept of that benefit being indicated by evidence of prevention of an otherwise probable actual use due to the lack of encoding seems to me to be a progressive policy.

The document cited is a WG2 contribution from the German NB (Karl
Pentzlin?), not a policy statement by UTC or WG2.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­