John Hudson asked: > I would > like to know what the presumed purpose of U+2616 and U+2617 is.
In Unicode? To map to JIS X 0213. You need to ask the JSC what *their* intent was in adding these two characters to the Japanese standard. > Not so. Both sides has four generals: two 'gold' and two 'silver'. The gold and > silver > generals differ from each other, but each side's pieces are entirely identical. Except for orientation on the board, of course. > > By the way, if any Unicoders play shogi, I do -- or used to, a number of years ago. > I could bring my travel set next time I come to > the conference. Unfortunately, I generally attend the UTC meetings and not the conferences, so our distribution is complementary. --Ken P.S. Regarding the dominoes per se, I'm coming down on the side of those arguing (as John Cowan has) that the *orientation* of the bones is not significant in the plain text usages. The *characters* to encode here should be for each distinct bone, regardless of orientation. Layout orientation can be handled by other means. I also concur with John that going beyond the double-twelve (for now) is just speculative and not supported by actual use in dominoes books. This is not a case where things are made simpler by encoding a set of 724 symbols. With only a canonical orientation of each distinct *bone* required for the basic characters, and 0..12 = 13, implies (13 x 12)/2 = 78 combinations + 1 for the back of a tile, you just need 79 symbols for a core set. *That* would be a far more palatable proposal than the current one.
