At 10:06 AM 1/18/2002 -0700, Robert Palais wrote: >Which seems to make Unicode a defender of the status quo. Inaction is >as political as action. "We are holders of the standards >for the technology for encoding symbols, and we won't admit new symbols >until they are widely used..." not necessarily the intent, but possibly >the impact - that evolution of symbolic communication will be hampered?
I think anyone is free to have other competing standards, and there have been other strong ones during the lifecycle of Unicode (ISO 10646 for instance). No one doubts that there are other characters that would be useful to encode. But the original concept of unicode as a 2 byte encoding leaves 64K code points. Unicode as a group quickly found out that was not enough to make everyone happy. As it is, the standard is rife with kluges in the encoding scheme. The limitation of characters to those that are in current use is related in large part to the code point limitations and partially to the desire to prioritize work. It takes the same amount of work to add a character or group of characters regardless of whether or not those characters will be used. there are plenty of characters which exist in the literature that are not ended in Unicode, and in fact are specifically excluded: those of written but dead languages. Newly proposed characters at least have a process: get them in use and addition to Unicode will be easy. In your case, one way to go about that may be to build a (probably pretty straightforward) script that searches out instances of 2pi in tex and word files, etc., and replaces them with "newpi" references. Create a font which has this character (maybe where the pi is now, or as a user defined char?). Make it easy for folks to get and use these tools. Soon there either will or will not be a substantial body of literature using newpi instead of pi, and a large discussion of why and how its adoption in math texts should happen. Once that is in place, I do not think you will be disappointed by the Unicode group. Right now "newpi" seems like a meme that is likely to die to the Unicode folks. Show otherwise, and life will be easy, as it was for the "euro" proponents. Best, Barry Caplan www.i18n.com <-- coming soon, sign up for features and launch announcements
