On Thu, 6 Nov 2003 12:51:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote: > > IIRC we talked about this a year or so ago, and kicked around the idea that > the Chinese square could be treated as a glyph variant of U+3013 GETA MARK, > which looks quite different but symbolizes the same thing.
I suspect that few Chinese would be happy to see a well-known, easily-recognised and frequently-used symbol relegated to a glyph variant of a Japanese symbol that is unknown amd unrecognised in China. There would be puzzled faces if the geta mark appeared within Chinese text if the "wrong" font was selected. And given that most CJK fonts aim to cover both Chinese and Japanese characters, how would the square missing ideograph glyph and the Japanese geta mark be differentiated ? By means of variant selectors ? If you were going to use variant selectors to differentiate the two glyphs (and neither glyph is a variant of the other for that matter), then you might as well encode it seperately, and be done with it ! The CJK Symbols and Punctuation block is largely Japanocentric, and I do not think that it would hurt to add a few Chinese-specific symbols and marks - after all if there's room in Unicode for wheelchairs, hot beverages, umbrellas with raindrops, hot springs, etc. etc., you would think that room could be made for the Chinese missing ideograph symbol which is used with such great frequency in modern reprints of old texts. Probably worthwhile making a proposal and letting UTC/WG2 decide. Andrew
