Unicode

On 18 September 1997, Michael Everson has proposed Klingon for inclusion in Unicode (1), but the proposal(2) was rejected in May 2001 because of "lack of evidence of usage in published literature" and "lack of organized community interest" (3).

Several fonts and programs, like quja', are using his unicode chart to type Klingon.

New request 2016

In November 2016, long term Klingonist and member of the KLI Mark Shoulson has submitted a paper to the Unicode Consortium asking to encode pIqaD finally.(4)

They always said it wasn't encoded because people weren't using it: Shoulson disproves that claim in the document. The discussion on the Unicode mailing list started to heat up again; this time they were saying that there are problems with Paramount's copyright and all (see Copyright Issue), but Shoulson argues that this is not relevant, and even if it is, they should decide whether or not to encode and *then* we'll worry about difficulties carrying that out.

Mark Shoulson has been talking to various UTC members, and the official UTC meeting is about the end of November 2016, so it will be brought up then and they'll probably have at least some sort of response after that. Shoulson said on the KLI's mailing list in a message of 08 Nov 2016:

I'm not going to let them off the hook without at least some *sensible* answer and a path forward (and an explanation as to why the Tolkien alphabets, which apparently may also have copyright issues, are on the Roadmap, even if they aren't encoded, while pIqaD is not only not on the roadmap, but given as an example on the "Not on the Roadmap" page as something not worthy of being there.)

Updated information

David Yonge-Mallo received some info about from the committee:

• the proposal missed the deadline for the November meeting, but is on the agenda for the January one
• the good news is that the committee considers the evidence of use for Klingon is now sufficient
• the rest of the proposal is in good shape (other than lack of a date), only the IP stands in the way
• Tengwar was added to the roadmap before IP issues arose; adding Klingon to the roadmap has no real effect while IP issues are unresolved
• their recommendation is that the Klingon community work towards getting the IP owners to engage with them to settle the IP issues

Unicode chart

See also

• Fonts
• Portal Software
• pIqaD in Emails
• Perl modules for automatic conversion to XIFAN HOL
• PIqaD Material From Wikipedia

References

1 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConScript_Unicode_Registry

2 : Proposal to encode Klingon in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2 by Michael Everson, 18 Sep 2016

3 : UTC Archive of Notices of Non-Approval, 21 May 2001

4 : "Proposal to encode Klingon in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2", by Mark Shoulson

5 : ConScript Unicode Registry