<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </head> <body><div class="auto-created-dir-div" dir="auto" style="unicode-bidi: embed;"><style>p{margin:0}</style>In my opinion it would be far better to seek a situation of a helpful licence for a small payment as acknowledgement of their rights than to seek a situation of waiving.<div><p><br></p><p>The Unicode Standard could have a section on Scripts from Creative Writing, then a section of that as Star Trek and a subsection of that as Klingon glyphs.</p><p><br></p><p>Back in the 1980s I saw a paperback book "The Making of Star Trek" in a bookstore and I bought it.</p><p><br></p><p>I found it fascinating. It includes transcripts of lots of internal memos of the implementation of the original series.</p><p><br></p><p>One thing I remember, bearing in mind that the events described had happened in the 1960s, was a letter from a physician who had watched an episode on television enquiring how the doors that opened automatically worked, as such doors would be useful in a medical setting. The polite reply was that they were moved manually by two stagehands.</p><p><br></p><p>In later years I often remembered that when, by that time, such automatically opening doors had become quite widespread in places such as doctor's surgeries.</p><p><br></p><p>More widely I opine that it would be far better for the Unicode Technical Committee to have a "can do" approach to encoding so as to assist people pursue their dreams and aspirations than what often seems to be a "can't do" and "won't do" and an "only if big business wants it done" attitude that seems prevalent at the moment.</p><p><br></p><p>I declare an interest in that I have things that I would like to get encoded but cannot get encoded. I am at home in England using a laptop computer. I have a small webspace that originally came free with dial-up internet in 1997 but has been allowed to continue after the dial-up service closed, I have some budget software, though it is of very high quality. I am retired and simply cannot do many of the things that would be required to achieve the present high bar to encoding newly devised characters. Must my ideas simply remain as like some part of pure mathematics when if the encoding policies were different my ideas could be applied in practice and be useful to people? The Private Use Area is a great facility for trying things, but it is just not on for reaching the bar for showing established prior use that is required for proposals that do not come from within the inner loop.</p><p><br></p><p>I opine that the policy of all the proof of established use that is required before encoding that seems to be exercised when Unicode Inc. wants that, but abandoned if their mates want something done, is unreasonable.</p><p><br></p><p>It seems that a new policy of trying to provide service to people rather than continually pushing back on new ideas would be beneficial.</p><p><br></p><p>That would not abandon scholarship and doing things with precision.</p><p><br></p><p>Frankly, although it is the existing practice, what exactly, precisely, now that encoding using sequences makes the code space available for encoding vast, is the objection to encoding "items" as characters on the basis that there is a reasonable possibility that such an encoding might be useful to people in the future?</p><p><br></p><p>William Overington</p><p><br></p><p>Thursday 16 September 2021</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><br><blockquote style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 2em; border-left:2px solid #00ADE5; white-space: pre-wrap "><br><br>------ Original Message ------<br>From: "Doug Ewell via Unicode" <unicode@corp.unicode.org><br>To: unicode@corp.unicode.org<br>Sent: Thursday, 2021 Sep 16 At 17:03<br>Subject: RE: Difference between Klingon and Tengwar<br><br>Mark Davis wrote:<br>
<br>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td width="3" bgcolor="#888888"></td><td width="3"></td><td width="3"></td><td><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td width="3" bgcolor="#888888"></td><td width="3"></td><td width="3"></td><td>As I already noted, this imagined issue of "dignity" is offensive<br>
beyond belief from a group that's supposedly culturally neutral. <br>
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Let's be very clear. This is an open list where most of the people on<br>
the list are simply expressing their opinions. These opinions are too<br>
often pure speculation that simply builds on other speculation voiced<br>
on this list. With little or no factual foundation.<br>
<br>
This "dignity" explanation is of that sort. I was around during the<br>
discussions, and there was never any mention of "dignity" as being a<br>
factor. The principal reason for not progressing Klingon was in fact<br>
IP complications. <br>
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"Dignity" was my attempt to summarize, paraphrase, the second objection stated by Ken on Tuesday:<br>
<br>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td width="3" bgcolor="#888888"></td><td width="3"></td><td width="3"></td><td>Klingon, on the other hand, was a case *both* for IP issues<br>
interfering with a potential encoding that was being pushed *and* was<br>
an early poster child for what was considered "frivolous" encoding by<br>
many participants in SC2 as well as by many senior managers who were<br>
paying the salaries of representatives they were sending to UTC<br>
meetings.<br>
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If "dignity" is the wrong word to describe the quality of Unicode that would have been sacrificed, in the eyes of the senior managers, by encoding Klingon, perhaps "professionalism" or "credibility" or "seriousness" might be more suitable.<br>
<br>
I'm not a member of Team Klingon either, but I do think if Klingon is going to be non-approved indefinitely, we should be forthright about the reason(s). I'd love to see a statement from Paramount's legal team, formally waiving any IP claims against Unicode for encoding it or font designers for implementing it, just to see where that gets us.<br>
<br>
--<br>
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org<br>
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