There are two reasons we might not encode a particular image as a character. I had said:
Many images are not appropriate for use in plain text, or have toosmall a user community.
That is, you need to have something that is appropriate for use in plain text *and* have a significant user community.
"Significant"? How many people use medieval CJK race-horse-name characters?
As far as I have seen from the email, there is no real evidence for a user community. If a character only occurs in a couple of works, means there is simply not the utility in encoding it; PUA is the right choice.
I don't like shifting goalposts. We have encoded many characters which are extremely rare.
There is a much larger set of documents containing the Prince icon, but we don't want to encode that either!
The Prince icon is a LOGO, Mark, and is out of scope by definition. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
