On 12 April 2017 at 05:12, Garth Wallace via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: > > Later Xiangqi proposals by Andrew West focused on > the circled ideographs and did not pursue new diagram drawing characters, > and were eventually successful.
My Xiangqi proposal (http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16255-n4748-xiangqi.pdf) proposed a minimal set of logical game pieces for Xiangqi/Janggi, regardless of shape (circular or octagonal) or design (traditional characters, simplified characters, cursive characters, or pictures) which I consider a font design issue, and explicitly did not seek to encode circled ideographs. My proposal was rejected, and a different proposal by Michael Everson (http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16270-n4766-xiangqi.pdf) to encode all circled ideographs and negative circled ideographs attested in Xiangqi game diagrams was accepted instead. The accepted proposal for circled ideographs is a glyph encoding model not a character encoding model as for other game symbols (Chess, Dominos, Mahjong, Playing Cards, etc.), and in my opinion it is a very bad model for several reasons. It makes the interchange of Xiangqi game data and game diagrams problematic; it hinders normal text processing operations on Xiangqi game pieces (for example, to search for a red horse piece you have to search for three different characters); and in modern computer usage Xiangqi game pieces may not be represented as simple circled ideographs, but may be coloured designs showing characters or images. It is also very likely that vendors will want to produce emoji versions of Xiangqi pieces, and these could not reasonably be considered to be glyph variants of circled ideographs. There has been some negative feedback on the circled ideographs model on the internet, and I believe that Michael has now been convinced that this model is wrong, and should be replaced by a model using logical game pieces. Andrew