Sun 23 Jul 2017 08:41:31 PM UTC, comment #1:
David,
Here is some background on how the Pikto symbols came to be in Unifont.
Andrew Miller got a copy of the Pikto book in England, scanned the 880 glyphs, and put them in the Pikto CSUR range in the order they appeared. Based upon that arrangement, Johnnie Weaver and I drew the glyphs for Pikto. You'll notice that the CSUR assigns far more glyphs to Pikto than what we used; Michael Everson must not have had a copy of the Pikto book, going on broad statements about Pikto that appeared elsewhere.
I had been trying for quite a while to get a copy of the Pikto book and finally got one. (I am in California, and Andrew is in England, so I wasn't able to just look through his book at the explanatory information and other background in it). After getting a copy of the book myself, and also getting the Pikto-English Dictionary book, I adjusted a lot of the glyphs.
I also at that point wrote the predecessor to the utility unifont1per, so I could create the Pikto table at http://unifoundry.com/pikto/. I later generalized that code to work for different Unicode ranges and wrote documentation so I could release unifont1per as part of the Unifont package
We spent some time guessing at deciphering graphical components of Pikto glyphs where the artist, John Edward Williams, did not provide details, and also on some Pikto-to-English translations. Although he created a Pikto-English dictionary, he did not give English meanings for all 880 of his Pikto ideographs in it. That is why the Pikto table on the unifoundry site contains guesses.
On the (K) glyphs, we thought at first that we would draw out the molecular formulas, just as you mentioned. But some chemicals were going to be impossible to fit in a 16-by-16 pixel grid. On top of that, there are two molecules possible for Borax, and they are both very long (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax).
So after a fair amount of discussion about this very topic, the three of us (Andrew, Johnnie, and I) decided to leave those glyphs as "(K)" symbols, drawn to try to match the way each one was drawn in the original. That way they reflect the spirit of Pikto's creator to some extent, and someone could list the chemical formula after if they wanted, or substitute it for the "(K)" symbol. Unfortunately, John Williams gave no insight in his writings into how he expected those to be written in running text. It seems he just identified those chemicals as being fundamental to contemporary human discourse.
Thus, I think the best solution is to leave the Pikto glyphs as they are.
Paul Hardy
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