Unicode philosophy - technical symbols

[Doug Ewell]

Piotr Karocki wrote:

> We already adopted e.g. Symbols for Legacy Computing (1FB00-1FBFF),
> Emoji, hieroglyphs; why not include all ISO 7000 and IEC 60417
> symbols?

(unofficially)

First, ISO 7000/IEC 60417 is not freely available. Although the symbols themselves are available on the OBP, one must pay ISO or a member body for the standard itself.

Second, Unicode is not generally a symbol encoding standard. It has traditionally been a requirement that symbols proposed for Unicode be shown to occur embedded in plain text. Although many symbols already in Unicode, especially those encoded in the early days (e.g. Dingbats), do not seem to meet this criterion, the requirement exists now and proposals today are bound by it. Many of the ISO 7000/IEC 60417 symbols do not satisfy this requirement.

By contrast, all of the Symbols for Legacy Computing had already appeared (by definition) in computing environments as part of plain text. The clearly expressed need was to transcode text between legacy computing environments and Unicode.

Legacy Computing Symbols are not, and were never, intended as a precedent for all manner of standalone symbols to be encoded. The proposers, Script Ad Hoc, and Unicode Technical Committee all agreed to that. (And if you think the Legacy Computing Symbols proposals sailed through the committees, with little or no opposition, think again.)

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org