Encoding italic

Philippe Verdy via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Fri Feb 1 12:19:53 CST 2019


the proposal would contradict the goals of variation selectors and would
pollute ther variation sequences registry (possibly even creating
conflicts). And if we admit it for italics, than another VSn will be
dedicated to bold, and another for monospace, and finally many would follow
for various style modifiers.
Finally we would no longer have enough variation selectors for all
requests).
And what we would have made was only trying to reproduce another existing
styling standard, but very inefficiently (and this use wil be "abused" for
all usages, creating new implementation constraints and contradicting goals
with existing styling languages: they would then decide to make these
characters incompatible for use in conforming applications. The Unicode
encoding would have lost all its interest.
I do not support the idea of encoding generic styles (applicable to more
than 100k+ existing characters) using variation selectors. Their goal is
only to allow semantic distinctions when two glyphs were unified in one
language may occasionnaly (not always) have some significance in specific
languages. But what you propose would apply to all languages, all scripts,
and would definitely reserve some the the few existing VSn for this styling
use, blocking further registration of needed distinctions (VSn characters
are notably needed for sinographic scripts to properly represent toponyms
or person names, or to solve some problems existing with generic character
properties in Unicode that cannot be changed because of stability rules).


Le jeu. 31 janv. 2019 à 16:32, wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com via Unicode <
unicode at unicode.org> a écrit :

> Is the way to try to resolve this for a proposal document to be produced
> for using Variation Selector 14 in order to produce italics and for the
> proposal document to be submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee?
>
> If the proposal is allowed to go to the committee rather than being
> ruled out of scope, then we can know whether the Unicode Technical
> Committee will allow the encoding.
>
> William Overington
>
> Thursday 31 January 2019
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20190201/10a88323/attachment.html>


More information about the Unicode mailing list