* Marco Cimarosti | | 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.
It's not really very unusual in appearance, so I would expect an encoding using composed characters to work from a visual point of view. (I might be able to produce a scan, but it would require a bit of work.) | Another criterion could be semantics and character properties. E.g.: | | - Should that symbol be usable in an file name or resource locator? I would be somewhat surprised to see it used that way, but I'm not sure why *any* character would be rejected for use in such a context. | - Should that symbol be recognized as a Norwegian word with a | specific pronunciation? That would be application-dependent, I would say. Some would probably like to see the text as written, while others would like to see the "9:" replaced by "det vil si", which is what it represents. | If yes, a sequence that can be confused with something else can be | inappropriate for, e.g., a screen reader application. Hmmm. I wouldn't expect that to be a problem in this case. * Lars Marius Garshol | | What happens if I find a font that has this as a single character, | for example? * Marco Cimarosti | | 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. That's true, but on the other hand, when people propose new characters one of the reactions seems to be "can you show a font that contains this character"? But I guess what you are saying is that if the symbol can be encoded using existing characters having a font that contains it is not enough. I was thinking of a font where this was a basic character, and not composed from smaller parts, however. I don't know if that makes any difference. -- Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net > ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >
