Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign

Asmus,

most of your letter (and my previous one, for a matter of fact), is
opinion, which is valuable to voice and to be heard, but which upon
it's hard to argue, so I won't go into that.

However you write:
> What you and Andreas are advocating, that is not to add a code point, would
> require a wholesale glyph change for U+20A4. All existing fonts would have
> to be tweaked to suddenly have shapes based on a L in a Turkish slipper
> (that's what the "times-like" example in the proposal document reminds me
> of) instead of a script-like shape (based on £).

And I must reject that. This is not what we are advocating.
While not speaking for Andreas, *my* point is that if we were to
encode that writing on that mug or on the flyer (cf. the proposal you
are referring to), the identification of the incriminated glyph as
U+20A4 would be correct and preferable and right.

Thank god, for fancy flyer designers (who might want to have the
flashy anchor-style, or let's put it that way: technocratic
constructivist style) modern font technologies allow for glyph
variants via stylistic sets or other means. (i.e. there might be a
_preferred_ style of U+20A4 in Turkey, as there is a preferred style
for certain italic Cyrillic letters in Serbia distinct from the
Russian [= de facto general] style.

If the usage of the sign develops in a way that a disunification is
warranted, we can do so later. No need to hurry. The Armenian dram
sign was first printed on a banknote in 2003 (in the security strip of
the 10.000 dram banknote). It has been consequently used in newer
coinage and banknotes, appearing on the 1.000 dram in 2011. It was
part of an Armenian national standard. Yet Unicode encoded it only in
2011 in v6.1. That's 8 years. There was obviously no need for hurry to
encode a new-born currency sign. Neither is here need for hurry. We
can wait and see wether there's need or real basis for disunification.

Szabolcs
Received on Wed May 23 2012 - 03:43:41 CDT