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./


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