ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2080

Title: Request for two additional collections in ISO/IEC 10646-1

Source: Irish National Body
Status: National Body contribution
Date: 1999-09-05
Action: For consideration by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2

Collection 63 of ISO/IEC 10646-1, Alphabetic presentation forms, contains characters belonging to the Latin, Armenian, and Hebrew scripts. Recent work in a CEN/ISSS workshop specifying a number of "Multilingual European Subsets" of the UCS requires some of these Latin characters for backwards compatibility with Apple Macintosh character set. Being based on European scripts, the CEN Workshop Agreement has intentionally excluded non-RTL scripts, being confined to Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Georgian scripts. The MES-3A, however, is collection-based, and therefore the problem has arisen that it should require collection 63, but it cannot, because that collection contains RTL characters.

This need can easily be met with the addition of the two non-fixed collections specified below. Because positions FB18-FB1C are undefined, they have not been included in either of the proposed collections. If in future either RTL or LTR characters are added to these positions, it would be logical for the new collections to be extended to cover the appropriate characters. It should be noted that the specification of the LTR collection in effect reserves positions FB07-FB12 for LTR characters.but this seems to be in accordance with the structure of the block.

As this proposal, while a technical change to ISO/IEC 10646-1, is simple and non-controversial and as it would assist in the finalization of the work of CEN/ISSS WS/MES, the Irish National Body hopes that WG2 will loo favourably on this request and add these two collections to the second edition of the standard. If this is not possible for formal reasons, the Irish National Body requests that WG2 assign collection IDs to these two collections and resolve to process them in the first Amendment to the standard following the publication of the second edition, in order not to jeopardize the timely publication of the CWA, which specifies Multilingual Subsets of ISO/IEC 10646 in accordance with clause 13 of the present standard.

Collection name:LTR ALPHABETIC PRESENTATION FORMS
Type of Collection (Fixed or non-fixed):NON-FIXED
Number of characters:24
Plane 00 
RowsPositions (Cells) 
FB00-17 

Collection name:RTL ALPHABETIC PRESENTATION FORMS
Type of Collection (Fixed or non-fixed):NON-FIXED
Number of characters:51
Plane 00 
RowsPositions (Cells) 
FB1D-4F 


HTML Michael Everson, everson@indigo.ie, http://www.indigo.ie/egt, Dublin, 1999-09-05