Another example, about to be encoded, it the GOUP MARK, used on old IBM
computers (proposal: ML threads:
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m01/0040.html , and
http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2007-m05/0367.html )
Le 27/03/2017 à 23:46, Frédéric Grosshans a écrit :
An example of a legacy character successfully encoded recently is ⏨
U+23E8 DECIMAL EXPONENT SYMBOL, encoded in Unicode 5.2.
It came from the Soviet standard GOST 10859-64 and the German standard
ALCOR. And was proposed by Leo Broukhis in this proposal
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08030r-subscript10.pdf . It follows a
discussion on this mailing list here
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m01/0123.html, where
Ken Whistler was already sceptical about the usefulness of this encoding.
Le 27/03/2017 à 16:44, Charlotte Buff a écrit :
I’ve recently developed an interest in old legacy text encodings and
noticed that there are various characters in several sets that don’t
have a Unicode equivalent. I had already started research into these
encodings to eventually prepare a proposal until I realised I should
probably ask on the mailing list first whether it is likely the UTC
will be interested in those characters before I waste my time on a
project that won’t achieve anything in the end.
The character sets in question are ATASCII, PETSCII, the ZX80 set,
the Atari ST set, and the TI calculator sets. So far I’ve only
analyzed the ZX80 set in great detail, revealing 32 characters not in
the UCS. Most characters are pseudo-graphics, simple pictographs or
inverted variants of other characters.
Now, one of Unicode’s declared goals is to enable round-trip
compatibility with legacy encodings. We’ve accumulated a lot of weird
stuff over the years in the pursuit of this goal. So it would be
natural to assume that the unencoded characters from the mentioned
sets would also be eligible for inclusion in the UCS. On the other
hand, those encodings are for the most part older than Unicode and so
far there seems to have been little interest in them from the UTC or
WG2, or any of their contributors. Something tells me that if these
character sets were important enough to consider for inclusion, they
would have been encoded a long time ago along with all the other
stuff in Block Elements, Box Drawings, Miscellaneous Symbols etc.
Obviously the character sets in question don’t receive much use
nowadays (and some weren’t even that relevant in their time, either),
which leads to me wonder whether further putting work into this
proposal would be worth it.
