On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Doug Ewell wrote: > These flag characters were accepted and will probably find widespread > use in other contexts, but their politically charged origin is a bit > disturbing.
Similar characters may already be anywhere else in Unicode. One interesting example is U+262B, the so-called FARSI SYMBOL, which is nothing but the official symbol of the (government of) Islamic Republic of Iran, with no known usage but this. It was specifically designed in 1979 or 1980 for this purpose, and also appears in the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran adopted at the same time. One insteresting point is that it is not Farsi (Persian) in any way! It is a logo form of the Arabic word "Allah", also encoded at U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM. Another interesting point is no one remembers exactly how it has got into Unicode! It has been there since the Unicode 1.0 days, so the source is definitely not an Iranian representative in SC2. Another interesting point is that when the very final session for approving a very recent Iranian national standard, defining a minimum subset of Unicode for Persian information interchange, was being held, the committee experts voted for removing this character from the optional characters list (characters which need not be supported but their use should be according to the text if they are), telling that it's really not a character, but a logo: "It's not used in text, but just in letterheads". Is anyone collecting notes to write that "Every Character Has a Story" book some time? It's a good case for such a research! ;) roozbeh
