Unicode philosophy - technical symbols

[William_J_G Overington]

Asmus Freytag wrote as follows.

> The fact that a symbol is cataloged in some list is itself not 
> sufficient reason to consider it a text element in plain text. Which 
> would be a necessary requirement for encoding.

Yet it is not just "some list", it is an ISO/IEC list.

Yet why is considering a symbol as a text element in plain text a 
necessary requirement for encoding? Apart from that rule being the 
existing rule that was made at sometime in the past, possibly under 
different circumstances than those that exist now.

Is that rule limiting progress?

Suppose please, for example, that someone is using a desktop publishing 
program to produce a document, an instruction manual for a piece of 
equipment, the document initially stored in a proprietary file format, 
with the person intending to export the text in a PDF document.

One frameful of text may perhaps start with "Please consider the symbol 
in Figure 1 ..." and another frameful of text may show the symbol 
together with a text caption and text stating that it is Figure 1.

Is it reasonable that the symbol is encoded into Unicode as a character, 
notwithstanding that it is not actually in a run of text characters? 
Plane 5 is currently empty, why not use it?

William Overington

Saturday 28 October 2023


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