2012/11/8 William_J_G Overington <[email protected]>: > However, an encoding using a Private Use Area encoding has great problems in > being implemented as a widespread system.
Wrong, this is what has been made during centuries if not millenium ! Initially a private use definition, which was not "encoded", but found their way in widespread use once they were adopted by other editors (possibly by using glyph variants, including those also introduced by the initial author depending on the publisher he used and the amount paid for the publication. This is still true today: even if you define new glyphs, and as long as you do not explicitly give permission to others to reused those glyphs or variant of them, these glyphs remain private in terms of copyright restrictions on their designs. Making your publication "public" by depositing to a national library is not a situation where you grant an open licence to others : the legal deposit made at a national library is instead used as a proof of your date of work to claim your copyright on this work. > Also, I feel that implementation other than for research purposes using a > Private Use Area encoding would cause problems for the future: I feel that a > formal encoding is needed from the start. Certainly no. For widespread use you first need to create a work, claim ownership of copyrights, makde a legal deposit to proove it, publish an explicit open licence statement allowing reuse of your design by other authors, and then make your own work for convincing others to reuse these glyphs (or derived variants of them) in a way similar as yours. It is when there will be similar reuses by others, in their own publications, and when people will start communicating with them in a sizeable community, on a long enough period (more than the year of your initial publication), that the appearing "abstract" character will be saif existant (Unicode or ISO won't consider these characters as long as others than you alone are not using these designs legally in their published interchanges, printed or not, have not been proven to exist over a period consisting in more than 1 year by much more than just 1 independant author). > I feel that the rules for encoding such new symbols are out of date and not > suitable for present day use. > > Unfortunately, it seems that there is not a way available for me to request > formal consideration of the possibility of changing the rules. > Technology has changed since the rules were made. May be, but this just extended the number of technical medias useable for publications (even if copyright issues have been restricting a bit the legal reuses more tightly). There are still lots of documents produced on various medias (at least all the same since milleniums). Electronic documents are just newer medias for publications, but they certainly don't create a new restriction to permit widespread use. Also as the world population has grown a lot, the minimum size of the community needed to demonstrate its existence has grown proportionally (the requirements are larger for more recent documents, compared to historic characters, whose community of users has however grown with ages, because we can also include the new reusers of the historic documents over the much larger period where these characters have not been forgotten, allowing more documents to reuse them up to documents produced today). > Is it possible for formal consideration to be given to the possibility of > changing the rules please? Not the way you describe. You are trying to put the egg before the chicken. But you forget that both the chiken and egg have a common creator and are in fact exactly the same thing. So even if yo uare still required to use private encoding, this is not what is limiting the birth of an abstract character from your glyphs. What is important is the number of documents reuing them, over a long enough period, by a community of authors legally recognized (either because they are dead since long enough htat their work have fallen in the public domain, allowing a significant increase of the number of reusers, or because the exclusive copyright claims have been relaxed by an open licence so that other will be allowed to reuse your design or variants of them in their publications, on various medias, not just electronic ones).
