On the lack of a SQUARE TB glyph

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 8:57 PM Fred Brennan via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> The purpose of Unicode is plaintext encoding, is it not? The square TB form is
> fundamentally no different than the square form of Reiwa, U+32FF ㋿, which was
> added in a hurry. The difference is that SQUARE TB's necessity and use is a
> slow thing which happened over years, not all of a sudden via one announcement
> of the Japanese government.

Defining whether a pair of characters gets squeezed into one square is
hardly a plaintext issue.

The square form of Reiwa is a bit different, given its use in printing
time, where there may have been an expectation that it takes up one
square. It's also a new member of a tiny set, as opposed to SQUARE TB,
which people have been using already in various ways.

> New emoji are still being encoded. The existence of SQUARE GB leads to its
> use, which then leads to people wanting SQUARE TB and resorting to hacks to
> get it done. If you didn't want people to request more square forms you
> shouldn't have encoded any at all. It's too late for that.

It's unlikely that not encoding wouldn't have stopped the requests
from coming, and it's not too late for them to dismiss those requests.

Unicode, in order to become the one character set, had to become
backward compatible with all the major legacy character sets out
there. Unicode has piles and piles of frustrating compromises because
of that, but it was felt that was the cost that had to be paid.

> There is no sequence of glyphs that could be logically mapped, unless you're
> telling me to request that the sequence T <ZWNJ> B be recommended for general
> interchange as SQUARE TB? That's silly.

Why is that silly? You've got an unbounded set of these; even the base
prefixes EPTGMkhdmμnp (and da) crossed with bBmglWsAKNJCΩT (plus a
bunch more), which is over 200 combinations without all the units, and
there's some exponents encoded, so some of those will need to be
encoded with exponents. And that's far from a complete list of what
people might want as squares.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.