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

[William_J_G Overington]

Asmus Freytag wrote:
 
 
> The way I read the discussion on the list, it had descended into 
> general arguments.
 
 
Not a matter of "descended", the title of the thread is general as is 
the first question in the first post in this thread.
 
 
Also, it is not an "argument", it is a discussion. Sort of a round 
table, not adversatorial.
 
 
Peter Constable wrote:
 
 
> But the rational he was suggesting implied that any graphic symbol 
> that users might want to place on a page warranted encoding so that 
> the symbol can be implemented in fonts. UTC will not buy that.
 
 
Well, in fairness, I suppose it does imply that, though that was not my 
intention in that post. However, I do tend to favour a policy of 
encoding things that is wider than the policy that is used at present as 
I opine that that would help progress.
 
 
Even if UTC does agree to encode the krul character, it will take some 
years to become implemented. In the meantime a Private Use Area 
character could be used, yet that could lead to ambiguity, though 
possibly not if used in a PDF document and the font,, or a subset of the 
font, is embedded in the PDF document.
  
  
If using an OpenType font in an application that has OpenType capability 
one could set it up so that the glyph of a krul is displayed when a 
particular sequence of characters is used. For example, if the sequence 
%k were used for a krul then the glyph for a krul in the font could be 
named, say, krulglyph and the following added to the liga table of the 
font.
  
 
sub percent k -> krulglyph;
 
  
I have used that technique for various characters that I have devised.
 
 
For example, at one of the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences 
there was mention of there being no emoji for "I" and "you". 
  
 
I tried to design some language-independent emoji for those two, and 
some other, personal pronouns. Things I tried just did not seem to work. 
However, I devised a set of abstract emoji-compatible  glyphs and I like 
to think that they form a coherent, elegant, colourful, 
language-independent set of glyphs for personal pronoun characters. 
Alas, though, I have been told that the Emoji Subcommittee will not 
encode abstract emoji. I considered that a Private Use Area encoding was 
unsuitable due to ambiguity issues in interoperability.
  
  
So I have devised my own encoding system for them, so "I" is encoded as 
%11 and "You" as %21 (that is, 2 for second person, 1 for singular). But 
it is not like having a regular Unicode encoding. I feel that these 
codes are just not going to get applied very much at all. But there we 
are. 
  
  
The bar for getting newly invented characters encoded into regular 
Unicode is so very high. Is that very high bar reasonable or does it 
impede progress? Does it mean that only large companies with large 
resources are able to reach that very high bar?
  
 
For example, newly invented characters that show good potential for 
being applied and that applying of them resulting in progress could be 
encoded into regular Unicode as unambiguous sequences (possibly using 
tag characters) without using any new characters. That would mean that 
people could use the characters without being concerned about 
intellectual property rights.
 
 
There could be a renaissance of progress.
 
 
William Overington
  
 
Friday 23 February 2024
 
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