Talk:Mapping of Unicode characters

message: I added the summary/categorized table of the UCS as I said I would on the UCS dicsussion page. I think if anyone feels the table should be narrowed, the decimal start and end could be omitted without much loss of readability. As I said in edit summariesa and over at the UCS discussion page, I'd like to also add links from within the table to sections of the mapping of unicode characters article and other articles too. I think each of the broad categories (lettered A through N) should be discussed in this article. Then links from each script-block could go to the article on the script or to an ariticle on the script in unicode/ucs.
So I plan to add the folowing sections to this article:
* Scripts (Modern and Anicent)
* Phonetics
* Unified Diacritics
* Unified Punctuation
* Symbols
* Numerals
* Musical Notation
* CJK and Unihan
* Compatbillity characters (legacy and others) and normalization
* Control characters, format characters and variation selectors
* Surrogates
* Private Use Code Points
Anyone else is welcomed to jump in on these tasks. --Indexheavy 01:16, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Article creation

message: I can understand how you might read it that way in isolation. I'm not trying to editorialize so much as help make the distinction between semantic characters and glyphs clearer. Many people cite it as a mantra, but don't necessarily understand it (now I'm editorializing). The point that this section (and what I plan to add to the linked main article) is to show that UCS lists the characters according to their glyph names. Meanwhile Unicode adds alias names that try to get a t the phoneme semantics. Right now its a hybird that helps serve as an excellent example of this distinction so often cited (numerals too, though less so). I hope that makes it clearer what I'm trying to do there. In the past many of these articles have simply been long lists of Unicode characters (at one point there was a single article deovted to every character). I didn't find that very encylopedic. I think here at wikipedia we serve readers better by expositing and providing examples and fleshing out these categories and expositing on some of the idiosynncratic characters (like the phoneme characters). --Indexheavy 02:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  BTW, perhaps I'm not understanding correctly what you thought was editorializing. Please respond here to clarify. Indexheavy 02:56, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  For some reason I missed your comment here until now. I wasn't ignoring you, I just didn't see it. I'm sure there are all sorts of interesting storeis, behind the scenes disputes and whatnot surrounding the Unicode and UCS. I'm not trying to write about that (nor do I have any expertise or sources on it). I'm trying to write from the Unicode Standard and the other publications of the Unicode consortium on their rendition of the "mapping of unicode characters". You're accusing me of violating WP:OR, yet I say again, I'm the only one who has added a reference to this article. I understand I could use some more specific references, but its quite disingenuine to accuse me of OR when not a single reference existed for this article until I began my edits. Secondly, on the charge of violating WP:SYN, I'm drawing only from the Unicode Standard (which is what I'm most familiar with) and not synthesizing from multiple sources as the policy outlines. I'm also not trying to advance a position. Perhaps if you told me what position you fear I'm advancing we could clear the air and I could try to avoid that misperception as I draft and redraft my material. Indexheavy 09:59, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  On the charge of editorializing 

message: Indexheavy, before you continue "overhauling" this article, may I ask you to cite your sources. Your "semantic phonemes" and "semantic characters" etc., while well-meant, simply add to the confusion (as I argued here). You want to "help make the distinction between semantic characters and glyphs clearer". I appreciate the thought, but at present you are not exactly helping. First of all, show that your usage of "semantic character" (as opposed to simple "character" is in any way endorsed by Unicode. Unless you do that, I'm afraid we'll have to deep revert to April 25. thanks. dab (𒁳) 11:37, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Just to help you understand where my terminology comes from, here's a useful quote from The Unicode Standard 5.0 (p15): "The Unicode Standard draws a distinction between characters, which are the smallest components of written language that have semantic value, and glyphs, which represent the shapes that characters can have when they are rendered or displayed". For Uniocde (especially in contrast to ISO and the UCS without Unicode), many of the compatibility characters (like the Arabic initial, isolated, medial and final fomrs) are redundant. They are character encoding forms and not simply the character as "the smallest components of language that have semantic value" but rather characters that encode a specific abstract glyph for another character. Anything could be encoded as a character. For example, one could designate that code point U+E0FFA will be the letter 'g' from Linotypes Times Roman font version 2.3 released in 1992 (the dingbat characters are a similar example acknoledged by the Unicode Standard). However, these are not examples of semantic characters, but rather characters that encode glyphs. Unicode’s approach in contrast involves moving the handling of these forms/varaints to smart font technology and smart text rendering. These are distinctions made in the Unicode Standard: distinctions I'm trying to explain to a general reader in an encyclopedic manner. I feel a bit like I'm taking shots in the dark here. I'm having a hard time understnading how you read the Unicode Standard. But I'm trying to find ways to begin the conversation. Please let me know how you might reprhase some of my prose. In doing that we might start to understand the different readings. Indexheavy 11:17, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Indexheavy

message: The article's first sentence states the total number of code points:
:1,114,112 = 220 + 216 or 17 × 216
The second explanation is easy to visualize: 216 thingies per plane times 17 planes. But I find the first one confusing. I know it's correct (220 = 24 × 216 = 16 × 216), but why obscure the number this way? Where does that variant come from? --193.99.145.162 17:04, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I assume it's just there to give an order of magnitude to the number of code points available. -- Beland (talk) 17:28, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  2^20 + 2^16 ? 

message: The article claims that the Lepcha script (1C00-1C4F) is part of Unicode 5.0. It isn't.— Preceding unsigned comment added by MBisanz (talk • contribs) 23:33, 22 November 2007‎ 
:I guess that claim has since been removed. -- Beland (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lepcha? 

message: I'm proposing that this article be split into 5 sub articles, along the first 5 main entries on the TOC.  Mbisanz (talk) 23:33, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok its been about 12 days and no comments, so I'm gonna begin to split it later tonight.  Remember, it can always be rolled back if it turns out this is counter to consensus.  Mbisanz (talk) 03:55, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I just noticed that the article split resulted in several "Big - see Large / Large - see Big" type situations. The main article refers to the five sub-articles as "main article" and three of them return the favor (the other two seem to have been orphaned). I do not have the expertise to tell exactly what happened, but I read through WP:SS and I am pretty sure this is SNAFU. Cawifre (talk) 21:00, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Splitting

message: "Unicode’s Universal Character Set potentially supports over 1 million (1,114,112 = 220 + 216 or 17 × 216, hexadecimal 110000) code points".  Hey, you guys, this is an encyclopedia, intended mainly for non-specialists.  So what's with this unnecessary, snotty, patronising jargon?  "Potentially Supports"????  You mean, that without this character set, these "code points" would potentially fall over?  And "code point"?  How about actually saying what this means?  Currently, the message is "if you don't know what \"code point\" means, you're too stupid to be reading this article".
You could reformulate this in courteous English so easily: "Unicode's Universal Character Set could code over 1 million different characters". AMackenzie (talk) 13:29, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I tried to integrate your suggestions into the intro. -- Beland (talk) 17:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  WOE's a code point? 

message: Regarding the edit, [], the Unicode standard does recommend a Corporate Use Subarea and an End-User Subarea, but they are not properties of characters; nor are they bounded on one side as regions. One cannot look at a PUA code point and say it is corporate use or end-user use; one can only say it might be, and even then Unicode does not require the distinction. From the specification introduction:
“Character properties” precisely describes what PUA does not assign. Strebe (talk) 02:21, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  About Private Use Area character properties 

message: The separate article "Universal Character Set characters" apparently was intended to describe the same thing – mapping of UCS characters – from the PoV of ISO/IEC, not Unicode Consortium. Even though, it contains now virtually the same information as "Mapping of Unicode characters". Incnis Mrsi (talk) 18:12, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. I long to read a well written paragraph about the diff & overlap of these two. Certainly there should not be two articles. -DePiep (talk) 21:14, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

text: Disagree. Unicode characters have several properties that are not recognized by ISO/IEC 10646, and hence the UCS. This article describes those properties, the UCS characters article does not, and should not. VanIsaacWScontribs 23:29, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  The UCS characters article? Why article, not redirect to Mapping of Unicode characters? Of course, there are Unicode properties unrecognized by ISO/IEC, but the mapping is though the same. Is the PoV of ISO/IEC notable enough to be described in a separate article? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 08:28, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

text: Should be clarified now.  The entire merge has landed, so feel free to tweak anything you're still unsatisfied with.  It was rather complicated combining the overlapping parts, so I may have done some things slightly wrong. -- Beland (talk) 18:45, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merging "UCS characters"