Is there some work at CEN to align its MES-2 subset into a revized (MES-2.1 ???) which not only takes into consideration the ISO10646 reference but also its Unicode properties to make this set self-closed, and actually implementable, at least with NFC closure and case-mappings closure?
No. The relevant CEN committee is now dormant.
I still note that modern Hebrew and Arabic are excluded from MES-2, as they are not used in any official language in the European Union or EFTA, or future EU candidates. But They are certainly of great interest for countries with which the EU is a major partner, and which are using these scripts. In some future, it would be needed to include support for modern Georgian (a subset of U+10A0..U+10FF), and modern Armenian (a subset of U+0530..U+058F), as well as some characters from Cyrillic Supplementary (in U+0500..U+052F).
The European Multilingual Subset supports all of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian. Unicode supports Hebrew and Arabic.
On the opposite, I don't understand why MES-2 included characters in row U+25xx (Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes)
Legacy compatability with IBM and others.
which are not strictly needed for text purpose (notably legal publications of the E.U., which should better use markup systems), and the two Alphabetic Presentation Forms U+FB01..U+FB02 (<fi> and <fl> ligatures) which are really unneeded, even for legal purposes, or they should have been coherent and included <ff>, <ffi>, <ffl> ligatures...
Legacy compatibility with Apple.
I suppose that this may come from widely used legacy encodings in some EU+EFTA+European Council countries, but CEN should have avoided them (they could still be selected by font renderers, if available in fonts).
You are entitled to your opinion. This work was begun and finished long ago. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
