On 7/22/2012 7:08 AM, Gary Kilfear wrote:
should we submit a proposal for these Chinese punctuation?
My take is that a proposal, with its requirements for evidence and
samples, it the best way to systematically capture and collect the
information.
Once everything is on the table, UTC will be in a position to resolve
these issues.
It may be, that some characters exist that are "perfect" fits for some
required punctuation mark, but have been misunderstood in the user
community. I suspect that for KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT. Knowing the issue
would allow this to be better documented.
In other cases UTC would have the ability to review, and either reaffirm
or revisit certain explicit or implicit unifications. Detailed
documentation of usage (and examples of success and failure of certain
approaches taken by users today are essential here).
I'm personally no great fan of unifications of punctuation based on
basic similarity of shape and shared purpose alone. I believe that
vertical alignment issues as well as width (or sidebearing) differences,
if significant and visible, should be considered grounds for disunification.
Especially in multiscript environment, and those are not that rare,
really, it's almost impossible to get such unfications to behave
correctly without explicit font binding. And we all know that control of
that is elusive in many contexts.
Finally, one or the other character may well be missing entirely.
The existing state of affairs is not based on a systematic, complete,
and detailed review of the use of punctuation in China (or East Asia).
Such a review is overdue, in fact, and in view, the kind of document
that would form a suitable base for such a review would be
indistinguishable from the typical background document for a proposal.
Most helpful would be if this paper could be written like a monograph on
"Chinese Puncutaion marks and Unicode", and would include, on the same
footing also the material about existing characters that map well to
specific Chinese punctuation marks.
If that were done, the resulting paper could be used twice. Once to
support any necessary changes to unifications or any additions of
characters, the second time, as a Technical Note on the subject, which
will continue to guide users to the best practice.
That would have the most impact long term.
A./
