<!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><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Asmus Freytag wrote as follows.</span><div><p><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br></span></p><p><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">> </span><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">Yet it is not just "some list", it is an ISO/IEC list.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">Is that rule limiting progress?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;"><br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; white-space-collapse: preserve; display: inline !important;">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?</span></p><p><br></p><p>William Overington</p><p> </p><p>Saturday 28 October 2023</p><p><br></p><p><br></p></div></div></body></html>