I had a simplistic notion of the unification process for
CJK ideographs. Having just read of the actual process
in section 10.1 Han of The Unicode Standard 3.0, I stand
corrected.
Looking at Figure 10-4 on page 264, though, the six
characters representing "sword" are listed as "preserving
variants". If these characters were being considered today
they would be unified because R1 Source Separation Rule
was dropped by IRG in 1992. To me, these six characters
are different because they are, uh, different.
Table 10-3 on page 265, Ideographs Not Unified, it really
isn't necessary to read the reasons that these characters
were not unified, they are so obviously different characters.
Table 10-4 on page 265, Ideographs Unified, these characters
are obviously the same, except for the last pair which was
not unified because of R1 Source Separation Rule. Frankly,
I can't tell the difference between the sixth pair even with
a loupe and suspect that the same glyph was used twice here.
There is also an overview of unification on page 17.
I wonder why the first seven characters in the proposed
U32-2A00.pdf weren't unified. If mathematic operators are
to be considered distinct from mathematic symbols, don't
all of the mathematic symbols also need to be duplicated
as mathematic operators?
Best regards,
James Kass.
