Garth Wallace wrote on Wed, Jul 6, 2016 05:14 AM UTC:
Here's the link to the PDF on Google Drive. I hope that works. That's the original draft I submitted to WFCC. Since then the neutral compounds have been dropped (the WFCC reps didn't think there was a need, and I see their point) and the number of columns has been reduced to 6.
By "in running text", I mean in-line with written text, like in figurine notation, as opposed to appearing in an accompanying graphic like a diagram. This is important because Unicode is intended, first and foremost, for encoding text. The Unicode Consortium is unlikely to accept a symbol for encoding that doesn't have a good case for appearing in a text-like context (according to their criteria for encoding symbols, "symbols...whose identity must be able to be automatically interpreted and processed in ways that are similar to processes on text" or having "uses and usage patterns analogous to the notational systems used for writing"). Unicode has generally held that chess diagrams are inherently two-dimensional and therefore not "analogous to writing", even if fonts and typesetting have traditionally been used for them. To some extent I'm relying on the principle that, if a given symbol is used in chess diagrams, that symbol is used to refer to the same piece in figurine notation (this is essentially the definition of figurine notation). I'm not sure how far I can take that argument, though.
The problem with the cannon, I believe, is that xiangqi players in general don't even use a symbol for it, since xiangqi pieces are not sculpted figures but round tokens with the names of the pieces written on them. They just use the Chinese characters for cannon and catapult (ç‚® and ç ²), and those already exist in Unicode.
Here's the link to the PDF on Google Drive. I hope that works. That's the original draft I submitted to WFCC. Since then the neutral compounds have been dropped (the WFCC reps didn't think there was a need, and I see their point) and the number of columns has been reduced to 6.
By "in running text", I mean in-line with written text, like in figurine notation, as opposed to appearing in an accompanying graphic like a diagram. This is important because Unicode is intended, first and foremost, for encoding text. The Unicode Consortium is unlikely to accept a symbol for encoding that doesn't have a good case for appearing in a text-like context (according to their criteria for encoding symbols, "symbols...whose identity must be able to be automatically interpreted and processed in ways that are similar to processes on text" or having "uses and usage patterns analogous to the notational systems used for writing"). Unicode has generally held that chess diagrams are inherently two-dimensional and therefore not "analogous to writing", even if fonts and typesetting have traditionally been used for them. To some extent I'm relying on the principle that, if a given symbol is used in chess diagrams, that symbol is used to refer to the same piece in figurine notation (this is essentially the definition of figurine notation). I'm not sure how far I can take that argument, though.
The problem with the cannon, I believe, is that xiangqi players in general don't even use a symbol for it, since xiangqi pieces are not sculpted figures but round tokens with the names of the pieces written on them. They just use the Chinese characters for cannon and catapult (ç‚® and ç ²), and those already exist in Unicode.