> Hmmm. I accept Marco's statement that while it's a single symbol, it > doesn't necessarily have to be a single character. What is the rule > for deciding whether a single symbol needs one or more characters?
I don't know if Unicode's UTC has a rule or decides case by case. Applying common sense, I would say that an important criterion should be the appearance of the symbol (that's why I asked you for a picture). Although Unicode does not encode glyphs, if the glyph is visually distinct, then it's hard to say that a vaguely look-alike sequence is appropriate. Another criterion could be semantics and character properties. E.g.: - Should that symbol be usable in an file name or resource locator? If yes, composing it with ":" (a punctuation character, often forbidden in these cases) could be inappropriate. - Should that symbol be recognized as a Norwegian word with a specific pronunciation? If yes, a sequence that can be confused with something else can be inappropriate for, e.g., a screen reader application. > What happens if I find a font that has this as a single character, for > example? This is a circular argument: fonts don't contain characters, they contain glyphs. And each glyph can be mapped to one character or to a sequence or characters, and this mapping can even be subject to contextual rules. _ Marco
