Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[wjgo_10009@btinternet.com via Unicode]

Asmus Freytag wote:

>  This is an effort that's out of scope for Unicode to implement, or, I 
> should say, if the Consortium were to take it on, it would be a 
> separate technical standard from The Unicode Standard.

I note what you say, but what concerns me is that there seem to be an 
increasing number of matters where things are being done and neither The 
Unicode Standard nor ISO/IEC 10646 include them but they are in 
side-documents just at the Unicode website.

My understanding is that in some countries they will only use ISO/IEC 
19646 and not relate (is that the word?) to Unicode.

There are already issues over emoji ZWJ sequences that produce new 
meanings such as man ZWJ rocket producing the new meaning of astronaut 
and the 'base character plus tag characters' sequences to indicate a 
Welsh flag and a Scottish flag and if something is now done for italics 
(depending upon what it is that is done) the divergence between the two 
'groups of documents' widens even if at a precise 'definition of scope' 
meaning ISO/IEC and The Unicode Standard do not diverge.

> PS: I really hate the creeping expansion of pseudo-encoding via VS 
> characters.

Well, a variation sequence character is being used for requesting emoji 
display (is that a control code?), so it seems there is no lack of 
precedent to use one for italics. It seems that someone only has to say 
'out of scope' and then that is the veto for any consideration of a new 
idea for ISO/IEC 10646 or The Unicode Standard. There seems to be no way 
for a request to the committee to consider a widening of the scope to 
even be put before the committee if such a request is from someone 
outside the inner circle.

> The only worse thing is adding novel control functions.

For example? Would you be including things like changing the colour of 
the jacket that an emojiperson is wearing?

It seems to me that it would be useful to have some codes that are 
ordinary characters in some contexts yet are control codes in others, 
for example for drawing simple line graphic diagrams within a document, 
such that they are just ordinary characters in a text document but, say, 
draw an image when included within a PDF (Portable Text Format) 
document. Their use would be optional so that people who did not want to 
use them could just ignore them and applications that did not use them 
as control codes could just display a glyph for each character. Yet 
there could be great possibilities for them if the chance to get them 
into ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard were possible.

William Overington
Saturday 19 January 2019


William Over