Re: '㏄' versus 'cc' and '㎍' versus 'µg' usage [tlug]

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

Michal Hajek wrote:
> ...  so I asked the friend (engine researcher) and he claims that here
> in Europe (GB excluded) even two characters eg. 'cc' are not used.
> People stick to SI units. I do not know about Great Britan though. 
>
> Best regards
> Michal

There's huge confusion going on here. Two entirely different conversations:

(1) About what names people use for units:  for example is 1/1000 of a 
litre a 'cc' (cubic centimetre) or an 'ml' (millilitre). Etc etc. This 
was not the original question at all.

(2) About Unicode (pseudo-)characters which are in fact a sequence of 
ordinary characters (like 'cc') pretending to be a single character. I 
don't know about Chinese or Korean (which are also 'tofu' printing 
systems), but these are certainly common in Japanese. They exist because 
the unit of (traditional, molten metal) printing uses a large "character 
box" as its unit - large enough to hold an elaborate kanji. These 
abbreviations (or SI symbols, makes no difference to topic (2)) can 
easily fit into a single "character box", so old-fashioned hand 
typesetting used slugs of type with 'cm' 'kg' (or 'Kg' in Japanese), or 
'degrees-C' on them, and slightly less old-fashioned character sets 
(JIS-xxx, of 20-30 years ago) also assigned two-byte character codes to 
them. Therefore they are in Unicode.

Unicode is not supposed to be a rationally designed character set, 
containing vast amounts of junk - rather it's simply intended to provide 
 mappings from all National characters sets, where much of this junk is 
seen as a National Treasure.

Brian Chandler
http://imaginatorium.org