Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Giacomo Catenazzi]

On 2024-08-15 16:07, Joao S. O. Bueno via Unicode wrote:
>> Unicode does not encode what *might* be used, it encodes what *has*
> been used.
>
> A blatant problem with this affirmation is that from 2000s-forward,
> everything text
> related goes _through_ unicode - including the characters used in the
> (allegedly more serious than 2D diagrams or art)  mission of writing systems
>   for spoken languages.  TL;DR: if this is true, than all innovation is writing
> is ultimately fated to come to an end as unicode asymptotically encodes
> whatever it deems worthy from pre-1999, and then all human writing and
> characters should be frozen forever.

I think you confuse some points. 2D diagrams or arts are not part of 
writting system, like bold characters, subscripting, cursive or printer 
characters (Unicode makes no difference). For complete description of 
writting we may need a image format (and possibly multi-layer). But it 
is reading a Shakespeare  in bold or in Helvetica change your enjoyment 
(or pain) of reading it? I do not think. In fact I find annoying reading 
old text with ſ (long s).


But Unicode had other scopes: in order to be used, it had to allow 
round-trip conversion with existing encodings. In my opinion is this 
feature which gave success to Unicode. But It is a diffent scope and a 
neccessity in order to fit the first pourpose.


As I wrote earlier: we see that techical figures in Unicode are poorly 
(aka not useable) in most systems. So probably the Unicode encoding is 
mostly useless. Let's not add additional parts nobody will use. And on a 
text book, where you explain symbols, you need much more control on the 
symbols. It would be wrong to just add "resistance symbol", and in text 
describing as a zig-zag line, or a empty box, or ...  Like using just 
Unicode to learn to write Latin scripts: you may describe it in a way, 
but the font will use a different design (think a, g, or just cursive 
writting). If you want to change my idea: find many sources where 
Unicode is used for the technical symbols (already included in Unicode). 
Real use. Else we can wait until sombody find them, and possibly 
adapting to real uses).


giacomo