Re: Encoding of character for new Japanese era name after Heisei

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

The Japanese Era names are not tied to the personal "names of possible successors". While it is possible to spell out the name of an era using regular characters that have been encoded, but for time expressions it's been customary to have a single code point. In some ways, these special characters are not so different from currency symbols. Following an official announcement, they will be immediately and widely requested / implemented -- as long as Unicode assigns a code point. I'm sure the UTC will be up to handling this issue. A./ On 6/2/2017 7:49 AM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote: But will there really be a new era name with the new emperor? All that could be made is a preservation by principle, but this does not mean that it will be really encoded. The lack of a "representative glyph" is a blocker. May be we could add instead a generic character for "New Japanese Era" (independant of the actual era) to be used in contexts where the precise era will not be available. The alternative would be to write the new era name using Kanas (or Latin) before the composed Kanji appears. I don't think it will block the localisation in CLDR even if it is later changed to use a newer prefered Kanji when it will be available. Anyway the names of possible successors are probably already known: how do they currently write their name using Kanjis or composed Kanas in a square ? These existing characters may also be used as a substitute, and I think this will be the solution used at least in the first months/years, even if there's a new honorific glyph adopted for the Emperor name 2017-06-02 14:23 GMT+02:00 Phake Nick via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>: Nowadays Unicode have encoded four characters, from U+337E to U+337B, as character for the four most recent Japanese era name, which people are using them quite a lot. In recent months, The intention for Japanese emperor to resign from the duty have been announced and Japan is expected to get a new era name together with the new emperor. It can be expected that people would want to type a single character for the new era name just like how people typed old era names now. However, with the new era name cominh into effect in Jan 1 2019 and the name of the new Japanese era is expected to be announced only half years ahead of the use of the character, how will Unicode handle the new era name? According to recent years Unicode release schedule, the announcement time will only be a few weeks before the official release of Unicode 11.0, and way passed the time of the beta. Is it possible for the character to be included in Unicode 11.0, or a 11.0.1 released some dates after? We won't know what the shape of the glyph would be until the era name being announced and as the era name itself is included in the unicode character description in past example, it is also not possible to come up with a name for the expected new character before the era name actually get announced, which mean if by usually process then an application cannot really start until the era name announcement have been made. Is there some methods to apply for inclusion of a character into Unicode without actually knowing what the character would be? Or if it's really too difficult to encode the character within the little amount of time ahead of the era's start, would it be possible to first reserve some codepoints for encoding of upcoming Japanese era, so that people can know what code point they will be using instead of using PUA?