Michael Everson responded to Christopher Fynn's question: > At 13:46 +0100 2004-09-19, Christopher Fynn wrote: > > >So, am I right in assuming that were someone put together a decent > >proposal for one or more shorthand scripts, there is no particular > >reason in principle why it would be rejected? > > You are right.
There is also no particular reason why it would be accepted. For any such proposal there needs to be a case made for why the shorthand should be encoded as Unicode characters. If there is a decent case that data needs to be interchanged in one shorthand or another using plain text Unicode characters, embedded with other Unicode text data, then an encoding would be plausible. However, the mere existence of a written form used to convey textual data does not suffice to make it a good candidate for encoding in terms of Unicode characters directly. On the one hand, it may be that data (including that in the machines used for shorthand recording) may be conveyed by preexisting intermediate "encoded" representations, which could be conveyed by existing encoded Unicode characters -- for example if they consist of conversion to streams of letters or digits (or other arbitrary encodings). On the other hand, representation of shorthand data directly may be too far out of the realm of what can be conveyed by a plain text rendering system. The analogy may be to the issue represented by musical scoring. If so, then an appropriate need might be demonstrated for a basic set of underlying symbols used *by* a shorthand system, on the assumption that higher level protocols and a dedicated rendering system would be required for full interpretation and display. However, before any *Unicode* encoding of such symbols would be undertaken, a case would be need to be made by somebody with an interest in such systems that having a standardized Unicode encoding of the elements of such a system would be useful and required. In any case, I consider Unicode encoding of shorthands to be a very low priority, compared to the effort needed for some well-known minority and historic scripts which are still unencoded. For whoever said that shorthands weren't roadmapped, that isn't completely correct. There is no specific allocation for Gregg or Pitman or any other particular system, but 11E00..11FFF is currently blocked out for shorthands, simply as a placeholder to indicate that we know such systems exist and that somebody might bring forth a proposal and that if successful, such a proposal would require some codespace allocation. --Ken
