From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Sat Aug 29 2009 - 07:36:18 CDT
--- On Saturday 29 August 2009, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote as follows.
quote
Howver, if you start reserving code points on certain
planes for such a scheme and attempt to enlist the Unicode
Consortium (owners of an encoding standard) into this
process, it's impossible for people *not* to perceive this
as *encoding*. That is the reason why these kinds of
proposals will forever be non-starters in *this* particular
context.
end quote
When you write, "if you ..." please note that I am not suggesting that I am going to start reserving code points. I am simply trying to formulate a precise suggestion rather than just state "two of the higher planes". Planes 10 and 11, A and B in hexadecimal, seem convenient in naming and convenient in location in relation to other encoding. If the idea is implemented, then it is for the Unicode Consortium and ISO jointly to choose the planes used in an implementation, planes A and B are just a suggestion.
Allocation of the sequence of two codepoints for each glyph would be done either by the Unicode Consortium and ISO jointly, or maybe by delegated registration centres, such as government trade mark offices and national libraries in the various jurisdictions of the world, each being allocated a block of encoding space to use for specific purposes.
quote
> If an even larger codespace were required,
That's the other reason: after 20 years of effort, the
Consortium has barely managed to encode as many characters
as there are "private use" code points in the standard. Your
worries about code space extensions are premature. Really.
end quote
I am not worrying about code space extensions, that comment was so that I could negate any suggestion that glyph substitution would be fraught with order of looking problems if an even larger code space were required.
I know that various items such as logos and personal gaiji are not encoded at present due to rules, not due to space considerations.
However, I feel that progress in information technology needs a way of encoding all such items in plain text for electronic library archiving.
Hopefully this thread will raise awareness of this issue and hopefully some people reading this will post agreement that something needs to be done, not necessarily using my encoding idea, but that something needs to be done. I feel that it is not very good if copied and pasted text from archived documents needs strings with ampersand or colon in them to signify the meaning of characters.
Certainly if I am the only person who chooses to post in this thread in favour of encoding of logos, personal gaiji et cetera for electronic library archiving in essentially plain text format then it is unlikely that any progress will be made with my suggestion. However, if there is some interest then maybe the Unicode Consortium will institute a Public Review of the matter and consider the responses at its next Unicode Technical Committee meeting in November 2009.
William Overington
29 August 2009
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