On 27 July 2018 at 16:29, Clive D.W. Feather <clive@davros.org> wrote:Steve Summit said:
> Fascinating. From the article:
>
> | Unicode [can't] set the standard for that new character [...] until
> | it knows what it's called, and it won't know that until late February
> | at best. Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out
> | in early March...
Why can't they reserve and publish a code point for the character, even
though they don't yet know its name or appearance? They know it's coming.
Oh, the codepoint *is* reserved: U+32FF. That's the easy part. Unfortunately, the rest is not so simple. As Ken Whistler's recent message to the organization, quoted and linked in the article, states:
The characters encoded for these calendrical symbols in Unicode have compatibility decompositions, and those decompositions depend on the actual name chosen for the era. Because the decomposition, once assigned, is immutable, involving Unicode normalization, the UTC cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early.