At 19:19 +0000 2002-07-04, Timothy Partridge wrote:
>Michael Everson said in reply to me
>
>> >- No scripts with a limited body of text in existance. (No need to exchange
>> >or analyse on computer.) E.g. Phaistos disk script
>
>> If the Phaistos disk were bilingual and deciphered, it could be added
>> even if there were only one document. Why not?
>
>I have the impression that there is a philosophy that the standard is for
>storing text on a computer for the purposes of processing and interchange
>and should avoid being cluttered with things that aren't needed. This seems
>to have precedence over covering all the important scripts.
Oh? What "important" scripts aren't on the Roadmap? The "important"
(national) scripts have all been encoded; Tibetan, Sinhala, Ethiopic,
Thaana, Myanmar, and Khmer were among the last "national" scripts
which were encoded. Of course we add Arabic characters for Urdu and
Georgian and so on as they appear.
>In the case of the Phaistos disk the length of text is so short that there
>seems little benefit in storing the plain characters even if it had text in
>another language too. Surely an image of the original or an accurate drawing
>is better at communicating the content and gives more of a feel for the disk
>than just the characters?
I suppose. But if Phaistos were deciphered I would be pleased to encode it.
>Personally I would be happy to see this particular script in the standard.
>Indeed scripts that appear on the cover of the Unicode book or CD have a
>rather poor record of appearing inside.
Oh no! We're found out!
>(The Greek from the Rosetta stone is there and I presume the KangXi
>dictionary page too as of 3.1, although I don't read CJK.)
I imagine the KangXi characters have been encoded by now. Egyptian is
on the list but is a big job. You may know I've done a fair bit
towards encoding Egyptian.
> > >- No symbols that are just a picture of something with no other meaning
> > >e.g. a dog. (These tend not to have a fixed conventional form.)
>
>> For instance, Blissymbols has a dog symbol in it. Granted,
>> Blissymbols is a separate script so maybe that isn't so convincing.
>> But what if a series of hotel symbols were added, with things like NO
>> SMOKING, NO DOGS, GUIDE DOGS appeared? Those do have some sort of
>> real semantic even though the glyphs may vary.
>
>Agreed although as you say there is a semantic involved. Interestingly in
>the NO... cases the semantic is provided by the circle with the diagonal
>line U+20E0. So there might be a desire to put a cigarette symbol into the
>standard (which is just a picture) so it could be granted a semantic by
>being combined with U+20E0. (In practise I doubt these symbols are used in
>running text so there is little call for them. Come to think of it, the
>colours involved are often standardised so a graphic would be better,
>discounting another thread.)
They appear in a great many travel guides as meaningful characters.
Research on things like this continues.
> > >- No archaic styles of existing characters. E.g. dotless j.
>
>> There are some archaic characters already encoded, and N'Ko is going
>> to have two of them. Probably.
>
>I was thinking of same character different style of writing it. In other
>words easily done with a font change. (The mathematical styles are a special
>case because each style is effectively a different set of characters with
>there own meaning.) A character that used to be used but is no longer is
>perfectly legitimate.
Like LONG S? :-)
> > >- No control codes for fancy text. E.g. begin bold
>
>> We have BEGIN SLUR in Western Music already. Might have use for BEGIN
>> and END CARTOUCHE in Egyptian -- or might not. Research continues.
>
>I gave the example of bold because it doesn't change the essential meaning
>of the text in a significant manner. In your examples there is meaning
>involved; the cartouche is a determiner for a royal name for instance.
Ah. I didn't track your use of the word "fancy". Still it's
interesting to note that Budge printed red hieroglyphic text with a
bold black line above the entire text which was red in the original.
Possibly a cause to encode "BEGIN RUBRIC". (It's never neat and tidy,
is it?)
> > >- No characters that can be obtained by using a different font with
> > > existing characters and have no semantic difference from the existing
> > > characters.
>
>> Such as?
>
>Inclined Cyrillic Be. I have that in a font on my computer but I don't
>expect Unicode to have a separate character for it.
What is "inclined Cyrllic Be"?
>Or (to my mind unfortunately) Greek letters in a Coptic style.
Copticists agree that this unification was false, and the paper N2444
Coptic supplementation in the BMP at
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2444.pdf has won the day and
it is agreed that the two scripts be disunified and the Coptic
letters answering to the Greek be added to the standard in future.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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