Unicode philosophy - technical symbols

[Piotr Karocki]

 Ad first.
ISO 7000 is not freely available, but Unicode also is ISO/IEC standard
10646, for 208 CHF (it is not exact equivalent, but neverless...).
https://www.iso.org/standard/76835.html

 Ad second.
Many of these symbols appear in text - e.g. clothing labels,
instructions/user guides for technical equipment, cargo manifests, etc.
Probably not all symbols, of course, but it seems that including all symbols
is much easier than making selection of symbols to be included :)


-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Ewell [mailto:doug at ewellic.org]
Sent: Thursday, 26 October 2023 19:25
To: Piotr Karocki; unicode at corp.unicode.org
Subject: RE: Unicode philosophy - technical symbols

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