Asmus Freytag writes: > Given > the nature of the symbol in question, I would personally see no reason to > object > to encoding it - especially given the current and projected lack of > availability > of other alternatives.
It's a simple combining character. Even if you can't do arbitrary circles around characters, you can take one character sequence and map it to the glyph in a font. Systems that can't do even that need to be fixed.
In other words, you would like to treat this as a mandatory ligature.
To make this work in interchange, we need to get the buy-in from enough platform, application and font vendors that they want to support this and similar characters in that way (and fix their products where necessary).
If we can get that kind of buy-in, then we could add this and other special purpose circled characters via the new "named sequences".
Lacking such buy-in, the addition of these as characters becomes more appealing.
The problem here is that we have a proven track record that implementers *have* supported additions to the character repertoire by expanding their fonts. We do *not* have a proven track record of implementers widely supporting special layout features, other than the core requirements for a given script.
However, since we don't want to continue to encode accented characters because of normalization, we are adding named sequences to the standard, so that users can identify required sequences of characters and accents by referring to sequence identifiers. Your suggestion logically implies the extension of that process.
In the case of symbols like copyright, we do have a precedent of encoding these outright and to *not* normalize them. (C) and circled C are not identical as Unicode stands today. This is similar to currency symbols.
However, unlike currency symbols, which are in extremely common use on all sorts of embedded platforms, and where therefore single character codes can be an advantage, most of the symbols like (Wz) etc. are much less widely used and could indeed be handled as above (and recognized as named sequences).
From the perspective of the users, this solution would be more appealing if we had the buy-in from major vendors to actively support this approach.
A./
PS for named sequences:
See: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr34
Draft Data: http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.1-Update/NamedCompositeEntities-4.1.0d4.txt
(the last part of the file name may change to NamedSequences*.txt).
A./
