Re: Text and Anti-Text

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Aug 14 1999 - 06:37:06 EDT


"Dean A. Snyder" wrote on 1999-08-13 15:56 UTC:
> I propose that 10646 reserve the 32nd bit as a flag bit signifying text
> versus meta-text - when the bit IS NOT set, the glyph is to be treated as
> text with its current value in the standard unchanged; when the bit IS set,
> the glyph is to be treated as meta-text, having the same value as its
> non-bit-set counterpart in the current standard.

Unicode has already a mechanism very similar to what you propose, except
that the meta characters are located in Plane 14 and that only the ASCII
subset is allowed to be used as a meta characters (which is probably a
good thing, considering that meta characters are most likely not seen by
the end users).

Please have a look at

  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr7.html

, understand that, while the mechanism is currently only used for
language markup, is of a much more general nature and is prepared to be
used to embed any type of markup.

You might find, that Unicode TR #7 does already provide everything you
wanted to achive with your proposal, but it is in addition compatible
with UTF-16, which your proposal is not.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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