From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Aug 29 2005 - 06:37:03 CDT
On 28/08/2005 18:57, John Hudson wrote:
> ... Since plain text, in order to be meaningful, is seldom ever
> linguistically neutral, there seems to me little *need* for such
> symbols to be exchanged electronically because the words they
> represent can always be used instead. ...
I see the point. But it takes significantly more processing, especially
for a second language speaker of English etc, to understand something
like the near-tautology "To pause the tape, press the PAUSE button" and
then to find out which button is actually the PAUSE button (which may
require consulting a non-plain text picture of the device), than it does
to understand "To pause the tape, press the ❚❚ button".
It does also seem somewhat inconsistent that, among a whole lot of
"Miscellaneous Technical" symbols, U+23CF ⏏ EJECT SYMBOL is encoded, but
no PAUSE symbol. But the double U+275A ❚ HEAVY VERTICAL BAR which I used
here may be a good substitute for the PAUSE symbol.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.16/83 - Release Date: 26/08/2005
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