It was not an April joke, it is very serious, even if the use of the character is from children or young people sending love letters or decorating their books or writing postal cards. This combining symbol is one of the most wellknown decoration you can find on texts. Of course it does not modigy the meaning of the letters it decorates, but it adds its own semantic by itself. But you could argue that this is in fact a variant of these i and j letters, similar to the swash decodaring letters, so it could as well be encoded as variants of i and j (normaly this decoration should not occur if there are other diacritics above these letters, so the question about how to present it if there's an extra acute accent for example is not relevant (most probably the heart would disappear as well, it dose not change the soft-dotted behavior of these letters, and I've not heard cases where the hearts would appear above other letters (in this case, the heart just occurs on the base line, or as spacing superscripts if they accour within the text run and not in the margins)
2013/2/2 Richard Wordingham <[email protected]>: > On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 01:48:57 +0100 > Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote: > >> But why isn't there a COMBINING HEART ABOVE ? (most often this heart >> is drawn manually with strokes and not filled, but a filled variant >> would also exist and if it was encoded then we would have two >> combining characters: >> - COMBINING WHITE HEART ABOVE >> - COMBINING BLACK HEART ABOVE > > The proposal for COMBINING HEART ABOVE > ( www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n258a-heartdot.pdf ) was > ignored because Michael Everson published it on April fool's day. > > Richard. >
