UTC Presentation

Dear All,

The UTC committee was kind to meet with me for an hour. As there are many scripts that they are dealing with in many parts of the world, I felt honored that they would give such an amount of time to our Mongolian discussions.

The first things we covered were the two Baludas - which is done as far as I can see - I have asked Deborah Anderson to verify that we do not need to do anything further. The changes as suggested by Andrew West in moving the general category of the two characters from Lo to Mn will hopefully be represented in the Unicode 9.0 documentation.
The second item that we discussed was the FVS MisMatch. It is a complicated matter to explain and even more so over the telephone. So, we resolved that I would explain just one of the seven contexts, U+1820, in full in a follow-on paper. Given that the one context is clear, then the other six would be understandable also. So, I will work on this over the next few months.

We did not get to the more important items of new FVS proposed changes, but hope to at a future UTC meeting.

So, for a summary of the meeting, there were three main areas that I wanted to cover:

1.)    The two Baludas

2.)    The FVS MisMatch

3.)    New/changed FVS Assignments

#1 is done on our part and we are to wait on the committee to complete their investigation and changes.
#2 I see now that I should have left it at the end rather than put it in second place. I will do another paper on this and submit it via Deborah Anderson in hopes that an ad hoc committee that can study it through further. I am going to place it at a lower priority than the #3 item however.
#3 This is where the bulk of our agreement lies - in the 12 new FVS assignments are suggested. I suggest that given the time and effort needed to explain these matters that this is what we emphasize over the coming year. I have added a new section I call the Velar Block section and then also the case of the 15 code-points that still lack FVS representation.

As we have worked hard over the past 6 months, I suggest that we recess until the Chinese Standard comes out. Then we review this important standard and attempt a strong harmonization between our work and theirs and go from there.

I am also passing the link reference to Erdenechimeg's important work - the Translation Report #170 - to Richard Ishida so that we have a direct reference to this at the Font Comparator Site. I feel amiss that we have not had that available from the beginning and apologize to Erdenechimeg for this oversight. Her work was essential to all of us in the early days of font development.

I am also passing Professor Quejingzhabus's Specification 9.0 to Andrew West who has offered to host it on his site. Thank you to Professor Quejingzhabu for this kind contribution to the greater Mongolian Font Development community around the world. And thank you to Andrew for hosting the work on his site.

Greg