New CJK characters

[James Kass]

On 2021-11-03 1:09 AM, Abraham Gross via Unicode wrote:
> Q: What would the specifics of such a system look like behind the scenes?
> A: I'm not sure yet, but I think Wenlin's CDL (http://guide.wenlininstitute.org/wenlin4.3/Character_Description_Language) would be a good place to start.

This web page gives an overview of some of the approaches:
https://everything.explained.today/Chinese_character_description_languages/

Wenlin's approach is quite sophisticated and has been around for a 
while.  A quick web search didn't turn up any previous proposals for 
getting Wenlin's CDL enshrined in Unicode, although Richard Cook has 
submitted various encoding proposals over the years.  If Wenlin 
personnel never floated any CDL-related proposal, it may be that they 
themselves consider such an approach to be out of scope for plain text.

As many of us know, Andrew West maintains a list of IDS for encoded Han 
characters, available here:
https://www.babelstone.co.uk/CJK/index.html
Using IDS to generate glyphs on the fly might be workable, although such 
an approach might well be relegated to a higher level protocol.  
Meanwhile an IDS can already be stored and exchanged in a standard 
fashion.  Counting how many of any IDS for an as yet unencoded ideograph 
exist in plain text might help to establish usage for future encoding 
consideration.

Ken Whistler crunched some numbers about CJK additions here:
https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2018-m03/0023.html

Additional information about CJK proliferation can be found here:
https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2007/07/cjk-unified-ideographs-to-infinity-and.html