Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On Oct 25, 2007, at 11:20 PM, James Kass wrote:

> So, if a rare character has uncertain provenance and meaning, but
> it is unifiable, shouldn't it just be unified?

Ideally, yes.  The problem is a reluctance to do a unification where  
you don't *know* that it's acceptable to the author of the original  
text.

A good case in point came up when South Korea proposed a large set of  
characters to be able to encode the Korean tripitaka.  It includes a  
large number of characters which were *probably* just variants of  
other characters but which *may* have been intended to be distinct  
characters.  In the end, South Korea was convinced that the case for  
encoding them as separate characters was weak and withdrew them from  
consideration.

> And, if that character
> is not unifiable, but it exists in texts (however obscure) that
> someone may wish to reproduce electronically (for posterity,
> perhaps), shouldn't it be encoded?
>

It should be representable, yes.  But that representation need not  
take the form of a distinct encoding.
>
> Is it really possible to speed up the process of encoding an
> open-ended set?
>


Yes, the IRG has taken some steps to do so.  Extension D submissions  
required IDSs so that a preliminary unification can be done by  
computer, TrueType fonts for a better ability to see what the  
characters look like, and better provenance information so that we can  
have a better sense of whether or not the characters *ought* to be  
unification.

Moreover, I have on my plate an action item to produce a second set of  
variant glyphs.  Variant glyphs have a number of advantages for many  
of the beasties proposed for encoding.  Registering variant glyphs is  
a faster process, for one thing, than encoding distinct characters.   
It also makes text analysis simpler and -- most importantly -- it  
takes these entities off the IRGs plate so it can focus on what  
actually *does* need to be encoding.

=====
John H. Jenkins
[email protected]