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> The rest, about 800,000 code points, are not allocated at the moment. They could become characters in the future. Why is Tengwar still not in Uniclde officia
by qwerty456127 3y ago
> The rest, about 800,000 code points, are not allocated at the moment. They could become characters in the future.
Why is Tengwar still not in Uniclde officially? What's the problem with it?
- WorldMaker 3y agoThe problem with Tengwar (and Klingon) is the problem with a lot of pop culture right now: copyright. The Tolkien Estate still exists and still litigiously upholds what it can of their copyright terms. CBS Viacom (Paramount) still claim a copyright interest in all the written forms of Klingon. Copyright is not technically violated simply by encoding the characters into a plane such as one of Unicode's, that's an easy open and shut fair use, but Unicode principals have stated they don't want to pass on the copyright burden to font authors either, which would be sued if they tried to paint some of those characters. (Why encode something that fonts aren't allowed to produce?) That should also be fair use, but the law is complicated and copyright still so often today leans in favor of the Estates and major Corporations rather than fair use and the public commons. (ETA: I'm hugely in favor that "conlang", constructed language, scripts such as these should be encoded by Unicode. I wish someday we fix the copyright problems of them.)
- teddyh 3y agoTengwar is in the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry: <https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/>
- qwerty456127 3y agoThe ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA). Why does tengwar have to be in the PUA, why not make it a first-class charset? It's not just a minor conlang a small group of geeks invented on a weekend, it's a well-established piece of the modern culture, isn't it?
- ssokolow 3y agoAccording to a sibling to what you replied to, it's because the shapes of the glyphs are still under copyright by known-litigious rightsholders and the Unicode consortium doesn't want to subject font authors to that.
- badcppdev 3y agoTo save other people the google: Tengwar is probably not in unicode because it is a fictional script from a book.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoHonestly, I wouldn't have thought that would be an issue to the Unicode folks. They have already allowed things (emoji) that have no place being in the standard, as they aren't even text.
- hot_gril 3y agoI feel like Apple pushed the consortium to add a ton of useless emojis for whatever their own reasons were.
- ssokolow 3y agoAccording to a sibling to what you replied to, it's because the shapes of the glyphs are still under copyright by known-litigious rightsholders and the Unicode consortium doesn't want to subject font authors to that.
- hot_gril 3y agoLooks like Georgian
- qwerty456127 3y agoI would wonder how many people are here who have never seen Tengwar. I would bet that's a minuscule minority.
- JohnFen 3y agoI've never even heard of it before.
- red_trumpet 3y agoThat's a higher bar than having seen it, I think. I also had to look it up, but as soon as I saw the images in Wikipedia I knew that it's from Lord of the Rings.