Re: Encoding Personal Use Ideographs (was Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages)

On 31/10/2007, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > We do not, and hope never will, encode characters just because someone
> > says that they use it for writing their name. And even if someone can
> > prove that they do use a special (non-unifiable) character for writing
> > their name it should only be encoded if it is used in a wider context
> > than someone's personal correspondence, for example in a book or a
> > newspaper, or at the very least in a national ID system.
>
> Whilst we all know that unicode doesn't encode names, CJKV is an
> exception to this, or at least was in the past.

With CJKV accounting for more than 70% of Unicode, perhaps the rest of
Unicode is the exception ;-)

> About 10% of the 70
> 000 or so CJKV are personnel names where even the pronunciation is
> unsure ( in the past both Taiwan and Hong Kong operated a system
> wereby upon registaring names of new borns, immigrants etc, the name
> (character not pronunciation) was stored dgitally, any characters not
> in the system were simply added. In Taiwan by law such records must be
> maintain for nine generations. The names need to be exact, consder the
> headline "Murderer goes free because character printed wrong".

Indeed, there is a requirement at the national level to be able to
represent personal use ideographs for ID systems etc., which I
acknowledged in my message, but the request to encode <U+2FF5 U+9580
U+9F8D> did not come from a national body, and, critically, was not
accompanied by any supporting evidence that there is a need to encode
the character. I don't like cutesy made-up characters, but if there is
evidence that a character is used in the public domain (e.g. names of
race horses) then it may well be appropriate to encode it. It's all a
question of evidence, which in the case of Ben's character is entirely
absent.

Andrew