Elaine, [Feel free to forward this on to the Hebrew lists you copied on your original inquiry, if you think it appropriate.]
> Peter Constable replied on the Unicode list: > >Which items? There were three at the June meeting: > >- atnah hafukh > >- lower dot and nun hafukha > >- qamats qatan > > Sorry--I was referring to those items *currently* used > within Michigan-Claremont-Westminster-- > lower dot and nun hafukha. Those two are under ballot now in SC2 as: U+05C5 HEBREW MARK LOWER DOT U+05C6 HEBREW PUNCTUATION NUN HAFUKHA Refer to: http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html for information about the status of accepted characters like these which are undergoing ISO ballotting. These two characters are in 10646:2003 - FPDAM1, which is in ballot right now. The ballot closes 2004-Dec-23. You can find links for any such ballots under the "Approved Proposals in ISO Balloting" section of: http://www.unicode.org/pending/pending.html > >No, the decisions regarding the characters above > >have already been made: > >WG2 approved these characters at their June meeting, > > I don't understand. In theory the standards world is > international and has *some* checks and balances---far > fewer, it would seem, since about 1988. Not at all. JTC1 ballot procedures are essentially unchanged from how they were in 1988. And if anything, national body participation in character encoding standardization in ISO is more broadly representative now than it was in 1988. > > Do these 31 member countries ballot electronically or > not? If by "ballot electronically" you mean do they have some kind of specialized automatic electronic tabulation where they press a button and figures get totaled up somewhere, then the answer is no. But most participation now is electronic in the sense that documents are distributed electronically on the web and ballot documents are submitted via email. That used to all be done by mailing paper around the world, but no longer. > Are there a 4th and 5th steps, or is the 31-country > vote the end of all that? Please look at the above link (pending.html) for some information about how these last stages of ballotting work in ISO. For the characters in question, they are currently in their FPDAM ballot. That is the last ballot where technical comments are considered. Following resolution of any comments on that ballot, there will be one more ballot, a DAM ballot. That is essentially a procedural vote, and does not involve any technical comments by voting members. It is a 2 month ballot. Following *that*, the amendment goes to ITTF for publication, and that process can take awhile, as ITTF and the 10646 editor work out any potential editing issues. In any case, you can anticipate that the two Hebrew characters in question will become formally standardized (in the ISO sense of that) sometime in the middle of next year, when ITTF finally publishes the approved amendment. The Unicode Consortium side of the picture is that the UTC will authorize the release of Unicode Version 4.1 sometime next spring, in all likelihood, containing all the characters in 10646:2003 Amd1 (including these two), once we are certain about the exact technical contents of that amendment. --Ken
