L2/02-192 Subject: Everson's reply on UPA Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 09:53:28 -0700 From: Asmus Freytag I had the action to convey the UTC's initial response to the UPA proposal in document L2/02-141 and this is the reply I received from Michael Everson. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The UTC has given me the action item to give the following feedback to you: "There is no consensus in UTC that repertoire (as presented) is ready for encoding. The authors are asked to: * Investigate further unification, e.g. 02F5, 02F6, and 02F4 We have been working on this since 1998. Ken Whistler saw an earlier version of this, and he suggested a number of unifications. (That was in Greece or Japan, in a hotel lobby. I forget which.) We took those into account. We believe that we have made all the unifications which we deem possible given the requirements of accurate representation of UPA. 02F4 is a middle grave, and differs from the usual grave, which is high, and a low grave. All three are found in UPA. Similarly, spacing middle double acute and double grave are features of the system. We're sorry that typographically and conceptually the UPA is baroque, but we have done our homework as far as unification is concerned. Were those three the only problematic ones? Could you please accept the repertoire except for these three characters pending confirmation from us by the Dublin meeting? * Separate out small caps forms and those modifier letters that are indistinguishable form super/subscript forms into a separate set for consideration for Plane1 This is not a reasonable requirement, and we do not wish to do this. It will impact adversely on early Uralicist implementation, and it is not worth doing that just because some people might use UPA's small capital M instead of styled text. They can already do that with a number of IPA characters in the BMP. ------------------------------------------------------------------------