Michael Everson wrote: > The following story was forwarded to me. The "offending" characters > in question are, I take it, the left-facing and right-facing swastika > symbols, often used in Tibetan, found among the Chinese ideographs at > U+534D (yung-drung-chi-khor) and U+5350 (yung-drung-nang-khor). > I hope that this story is not true. > http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=582&e=1 > &u=/nm/20031212/wr_nm/tech_microsoft_swastika_dc
I find nothnig wrong in proposing a font which does not have these symbols for use in European scripts, where the occurence of the symbol is almost always associated to the Nazi's party, but I think it would be wrong to remove them from fonts designed for Asian markets that need it to represent their script, in a context where such association is not self-evident. So as long as Microsoft puts the symbols in Asian fonts to support Asian character sets containing the khor symbol, there won't be problems if Microsoft creates a purged version of the generic-purpose "Bookshelf Symbol 7" font. May be the Unicode name should not be swastika but a transliteration of an Asian name (Tibetan, Chinese Pinyin...), and all references to "swastika" (included in code charts, and the name index) removed if they ever occur somewhere in the standard or in a proposal. However there's still a problem with the ancient scandinavian usage: it's not clear that the symbol would only fit in Asian fonts. However the symbols could be present in fonts made to represent old European scripts such as Runic, even if they have been used in translations to Roman-Latin or Church-Latin of these texts, with a Latin or Gothic script, or even in some other Uralic languages. However, I think that Microsoft would be more productive by completing its current support for the Latin script, notably with African languages, that really want now access to their characters in a font that ultimately will be mapped in a new coming ISO8859 page, which will be supported as well in Windows by a corresponding Windows-125x codepage for Pan-Sahelian languages, as well as a usable keyboard layout for them, backed on a standard French or Latin-Arabic keyboard used in these African countries (may be also on an English keyboard?). For now African languages are only representable on Windows with "Arial Unicode MS" which is limited by its Office licence. __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
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