On 13 August 2011 18:48, Sean Leonard <[email protected]> wrote: > > The Unicode code points U+0000 through U+00FF share the equivalent values > from the ASCII Standard, ISO 646, ISO 6429, and ISO 8859-1. In many contexts, > it is desirable to display all of these code points/characters uniquely and > unambiguously. C0 Control Pictures are currently encoded in the Unicode > Standard at U+2400; that block currently covers the undisplayable code points > at U+0000-U+0020 (plus a few extra alternatives/additions). However, the > undisplayable characters in U+0080-U+00FF are left out. > > There are several business cases in which C1 Control Pictures are useful: > 1. Terminal emulators need them for debugging. > 2. Data analyzers need them so they can have a unique character that when the > graphics subsystem/text renderers render each character, is intended for > display rather than for control effects. > 3. Engineers can distinguish when communicating between the data without > side-effects (i.e., control characters as pictures), and the data that > invokes side-effects (i.e., control characters used as control characters). > 4. There are use cases for historic or scholarly purposes, to encode and > discuss these characters in text, as distinct from invoking their > side-effects (and displaying nothing). > 5. To display all values in U+0000 - U+00FF as distinct _characters_, rather > than in hexadecimal representation (which makes deciphering the meaning of > the codes for graphic characters in the ASCII (G0) & ISO 8859-1 (G1) range > very difficult), in the same width and font as the rest of the graphic > characters. > > 6. In support of 1-5, font designers can design fonts that support C1 Control > Pictures and that map glyphs to Unicode code points uniformly and > interchangeably (two key architectural goals of the Unicode Standard). > Without C1 Control Pictures, it is infeasible to provide graphical > representations of the C1 Control Characters. This is an asymmetry compared > to the C0 Control Pictures block in Unicode, and thus should be remedied.
It would probably be useful to read the WG2 Principles and Procedures document <http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n3902.pdf> particularly Annex H "Criteria for encoding symbols", which states that: "The fact that a symbol merely seems to be useful or potentially useful is precisely not a reason to code it. Demonstrated usage, or demonstrated demand, on the other hand, does constitute a good reason to encode the symbol." (H10 on p.37) Unless you can show evidence that C1 control pictures are currently in use and that there is a clear demand from the user community to represent them in plain text it is unlikely that your proposal will get very far. Andrew
