What's the process for proposing a symbol in the Unicode table?

[Doug Ewell]

Freek Dijkstra wrote:

> In the mean time, I not only found the forms to fill in at
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/summary.html, I even find someone who was
> -just like me- "genuinely mildly irritated" with the fact that there
> was no codepoint in Unicode, and even created a website to fix this: 
> https://unicode-krul.nl/en

As you’ve probably guessed, writing an actual proposal and being available to discuss it with the committees (Script Ad Hoc and Unicode Technical Committee) is much more effective than being irritated that the symbol is not already there. Websites about the symbol and about the irritation, or other lobbying efforts, may feel good but are also not the road to encoding.

In the early days of Unicode and ISO 10646, say 25 or 30 years ago, a missing character might be discovered in an existing, commonly used 8-bit character set, and that was often enough to get it added to Unicode. For quite some time now, just about all of the “obvious” characters have been encoded, and it does take more effort to encode new ones, especially those that have never been represented in digital plain text before.

You will want to show in your proposal that there is demand for representing this symbol, which seems to be a handwritten convention, in computerized text. The Dingbats block is not a good analogy — those characters came from laser printers and symbol fonts, and thus by definition were used extensively on computers.

> I'll first try to contact them. I suspect that their genuine
> irritation was mild enough that is was eventually abandoned after
> seeing the effort it seemingly takes to get this done. :) Let's hope
> we're more successful this time.

As above. The amount of effort required for a symbol like this is reasonable and justified. Not everything that has ever been written is a candidate for encoding as a character. Good justification and evidence for this one will be needed.

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