I would NOT like to see our committees' hands tied by taking this list as more than guidelines. I understand that it is for an FAQ but there should be text therein to emphasize that these are not binding.
At 19:10 +0000 2002-07-03, Timothy Partridge wrote: >Why not just presentation glyphs in general? We seem to have queries about >Indian cojuncts fairly frequently. > >Some more suggestions (some of which have covered from other angles already) > >- No scripts with a limited body of text in existance. (No need to exchange >or analyse on computer.) E.g. Phaistos disk script If the Phaistos disk were bilingual and deciphered, it could be added even if there were only one document. Why not? >- No scripts which are poorly understood and it is not clear as to what the >characters are. E.g. Rongo-rongo. True. >- No symbols that are just a picture of something with no other meaning e.g. >a dog. (These tend not to have a fixed conventional form.) For instance, Blissymbols has a dog symbol in it. Granted, Blissymbols is a separate script so maybe that isn't so convincing. But what if a series of hotel symbols were added, with things like NO SMOKING, NO DOGS, GUIDE DOGS appeared? Those do have some sort of real semantic even though the glyphs may vary. >- No symbols that are only used in diagrams rather than running text. e.g. >electrical component symbols. Probably unassailable. >- No personal, ideosyncratic or company logos. E.g. the artist when he was >not known as Prince. This IS a rule. >- No archaic styles of existing characters. E.g. dotless j. There are some archaic characters already encoded, and N'Ko is going to have two of them. Probably. >- No control codes for fancy text. E.g. begin bold We have BEGIN SLUR in Western Music already. Might have use for BEGIN and END CARTOUCHE in Egyptian -- or might not. Research continues. >- No characters that can be obtained by using a different font with existing >characters and have no semantic difference from the existing characters. Such as? >- No proposals to rename existing characters. (But a clarifying note >might be added.) This IS a rule. >- No proposals to reposition existing characters, e.g. so they sort better. This IS a rule. >- No proposals for a newly invented character since putting it in the >standard would help promote its use. (Significant usage must come first.) We did encode the GREEK KAI SYMBOL, and when I proposed it, I hoped that it would promote its use. Why? Because I saw a lot of hand-painted signage in Greece which used it, but machine-printed signage which used the AMPERSAND instead. I thought that was pretty unfortunate. But I DIDN'T invent it. It is centuries old! Playing devil's advocate here, just a bit. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
