Overview
ISO/IEC TR 20007:2014 is a Technical Report on information technology - cultural and linguistic interoperability that consolidates definitions and clarifies the relationships between symbols, icons, animated icons, pictograms, characters and glyphs. The report harmonizes terminology used across ISO and IEC symbology work and explains how visually similar objects relate to coded representations used in computing and documentation.
Key topics
- Definitions and scope: Clear, harmonized definitions of character, coded character, glyph, font, graphical/graphic symbol, icon, pictogram, symbol as used in ISO/IEC contexts.
- Purpose and limits: Differentiates purposes (e.g., a pictogram’s intent to be self‑explanatory vs. a glyph’s role in typography) and explains strengths and weaknesses - such as strict shape requirements for printed standards (ISO 7000, IEC 80416-1) versus flexible glyph rendering in encoded character sets.
- Properties: Discussion of searchability, presentation (visual, audio, tactile), shape vs. fuzzy representation, encoding, animation and temporal representation.
- Relationships and workflow: How a sketch or symbol can become a standardized graphical symbol, an icon for user interfaces, or a coded character (e.g., in ISO/IEC 10646 / UCS) for machine processing and searching.
- Input/process/output and repositories: Considerations from drawing to digital representation, encoding issues, and management of symbols in databases, sets and repositories.
- Interoperability concerns: Cultural and linguistic impacts on symbol interpretation, and strategies for fuzzy matching, collation and accessibility (references ISO/IEC 14651 for collation).
Applications
Who benefits and why:
- UI/UX and icon designers - to align interface icons with standardized concepts and understand when a pictogram or icon can be encoded.
- Font and type designers - to map glyphs to characters and understand searchability and replacement strategies.
- Software developers & localization engineers - to decide when to use coded characters (Unicode/UCS) vs. image-based icons and to manage cross‑language interoperability.
- Standards bodies, technical writers and documentation teams - for consistent naming and interchange of symbols in manuals and technical documentation.
- Accessibility specialists - to plan multi‑modal presentations (visual, tactile, audio) and minimize ambiguity across cultures.
Related standards
ISO/IEC TR 20007:2014 is a reference for anyone managing the intersection of visual symbology and digital encoding to ensure cultural and linguistic interoperability in products, documentation and user interfaces.