Editing Blissymbols (section)

== Towards the international standardization of the script ==
{{More citations needed section|date=October 2014}}
Blissymbolics was used in 1971 to help children at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre (OCCC, now the [[Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital]]) in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], Canada. Since it was important that the children see consistent pictures, OCCC had a [[draftsman]] named Jim Grice draw the symbols. Both Charles K. Bliss and Margrit Beesley at the OCCC worked with Grice to ensure consistency. In 1975, a new organization named Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton led this effort. Over the years, this organization changed its name to Blissymbolics Communication Institute, [[Easter Seals (Canada)|Easter Seal]] Communication Institute, and ultimately to Blissymbolics Communication International (BCI).

BCI is an international group of people who act as an authority regarding the [[standardization]] of the Blissymbolics language. It has taken responsibility for any extensions of the Blissymbolics language as well as any maintenance needed for the language. BCI has coordinated usage of the language since 1971 for augmentative and alternative communication. BCI received a licence and copyright through legal agreements with Charles K. Bliss in 1975 and 1982.  Limiting the count of Bliss-characters (there are currently about 900) is very useful in order to help the user community. It also helps when implementing Blissymbolics using technology such as computers.

In 1991, BCI published a reference guide <ref>Wood, Storr, & Reich (1992) ''Blissymbol Reference Guide''. Toronto: Blissymbolics Communication International. {{ISBN|0-9690516-9-7}}.</ref> containing 2300 vocabulary items and detailed rules for the graphic design of additional characters, so they settled a first set of approved ''Bliss-words'' for general use.
The [[Standards Council of Canada]] then sponsored, on January 21, 1993, the registration of an encoded character set for use in ISO/IEC 2022, in the [[ISO-IR]] international registry of coded character sets.
After many years of requests, the Blissymbolic language was finally approved as an encoded language, with code {{mono|zbl}}, into the [[ISO 639-2]] and [[ISO 639-3]] standards.

A proposal was posted by [[Michael Everson]] for the Blissymbolics script to be included in the [[Universal Character Set]] (UCS) and encoded for use with the [[ISO/IEC 10646]] and [[Unicode]] standards.<ref name="Everson">[[Michael Everson|Everson, Michael]] (1998). [http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1866.pdf Encoding Blissymbolics in Plane 1 of the UCS.] Retrieved 19 October 2011.</ref> BCI would cooperate with the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) and the ISO Working Group.
The proposed encoding does not use the lexical encoding model used in the existing ISO-IR/169 registered character set, but instead applies the Unicode and ISO character-glyph model to the ''Bliss-character'' model already adopted by BCI, since this would significantly reduce the number of needed characters.{{citation needed|date=October 2014}} Bliss-characters can now be used in a creative way to create many new arbitrary concepts, by surrounding the invented words with special Bliss indicators (similar to punctuation){{citation needed|date=October 2014}}, something which was not possible in the ISO-IR/169 encoding.

However, by the end of 2009, the Blissymbolic script was not encoded in the UCS. Some questions are still unanswered, such as the inclusion in the BCI repertoire of some characters (currently about 24) that are already encoded in the UCS (like digits, punctuation signs, spaces and some markers), but whose unification may cause problems due to the very strict graphical layouts required by the published Bliss reference guides.{{citation needed|date=October 2014}} In addition, the character metrics use a specific layout where the usual [[baseline (typography)|baseline]] is not used, and the ideographic em-square is not relevant for Bliss character designs that use additional "earth line" and "sky line" to define the composition square.  
Some fonts supporting the BCI repertoire are available and usable with texts encoded with [[Private Use Area|private-use assignments]] (PUA) within the UCS. But only the private BCI encoding based on ISO-IR/169 registration is available for text interchange.