On 19/01/2019 09:42, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
[…]
For one, many worthwhile additions / changes to Unicode depend on getting written up in
proposal form and then championed by dedicated people willing to see through the process.
Usually, Unicode has so many proposals to pick from that at each point there are more
than can be immediately accommodated. There's no automatic response to even issues that
are "known" to many people.
"Demands" don't mean a thing, formal proposals, presented and then refined
based on feedback from the committee is what puts issues on the track of being resolved.
That is also what I suspected, that the French were not eager enough to get
French supported, as opposed to the Vietnamese who lobbied long before the era
of proposals and UTC meetings.
Please,/where can we find the proposals for FIGURE SPACE to become
non-breakable, and for PUNCTUATION SPACE to stay or become breakable?/
(That is not a rhetoric question. The ideal answer is a URL.
Also, that is not about pre-Unicode documentation, but about the action that
Unicode took in that era.)
[…]
Yes, I definitely used an IBM Selectric for many years with interchangeable type wheels,
but I don't remember using proportional spacing, although I've seen it in the kinds of
"typescript" books I mentioned. Some had that crude approximation of
typesetting.
Thanks for reporting.
When Unicode came out, that was no longer the state of the art as TeX and laser
printers weren't limited that way.
However, the character sets from which Unicode was assembled (or which it had
to match, effectively) were designed earlier - during those times. And we
inherited some things (that needed to be supported so round-trip mapping of
data was possible) but that weren't as well documented in their particulars.
I'm sure we'll eventually deprecate some and clean up others, like the
Mongolian encoding (which also included some stuff that was encoded with an
understanding that turned out less solid in retrospect than we had thought at
the time).
Something the UTC tries very hard to avoid, but nobody is perfect. It's best
therefore to try not to ascribe non-technical motives to any action or inaction
of the UTC. What outsiders see is rarely what actually went down,
That is because the meeting minutes would gain in being more explicit.
and the real reasons for things tend to be much less interesting from an
interpersonal or intercultural perspective.
I don’t care about “interesting” reasons. I’d just appreciate to know the truth.
So best avoid that kind of topic altogether and never use it as basis for
unfounded recriminations.
When you ask for knowing the foundations and that knowledge is persistently
refused, you end up believing that those foundations just can’t be told.
Note, too, that I readily ceased blaming UTC, and shifted the blame elsewhere,
where it actually belongs to. I’d kindly request not to be considered a
hypocrite that in reality keeps blaming the UTC.
A./
