Re: Possibilities of future expansion (from Perception etc thread

From: Thomas Chan (thomas@atlas.datexx.com)
Date: Sun Feb 25 2001 - 15:10:34 EST


On Sun, 25 Feb 2001, Michael Everson wrote:

> At 10:15 -0800 2001-02-25, Thomas Chan wrote:
> >On the other hand, apparently neither CSUR nor you were aware of (or
> >chose to ignore) the clashes with the mappings between the PUA and legacy
> >CJK encodings and character sets, which [the mappings] have already been
> >implemented for 5+ years now on CJK versions of Windows.
>
> So what?
> Anyone can use the PUA for anything they want. The code positions are
> NOT standardized. If the "characters" those CJK people are using need
> to be interchangeable, they need to be properly proposed and put into
> Unicode. If they are not, then they are NOT characters.

I've never denied that anyone can use the PUA for what they want. If you
read my post more carefully in entirety, you'll see that I said:

  Of course, all of these clash with each other, CSUR, Microsoft's
  "Symbol", etc in whole or part. I don't see why there's any particular
  reason why anyone should really care about clashes.

If someone wants to use the PUA, there's no need to check CSUR or any
other source for "clashes".

As well as:

  Various groups such as academics, input projects, newspapers, etc use
  these ranges; perhaps the most prominent is HKSCS (and its predecessor
  GCCS), which had been placed in CP950's user-defined zones, and thus has
  a mapping to the PUA exists (and .tte fonts are created by using PUA
  codepoints in the cmap). If you chose other ranges, you might clash
  with CP932 or CP949's. Similar ranges are used on the Macintosh as
  well. (I don't know about other platforms.)

If you want examples of these characters (and in some cases, publically
available .tte fonts), there's:

  http://www.info.gov.hk/gccs/ (GCCS, from the Hong Kong SAR government)
  http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/index.html (HKSCS, also from
    the Hong Kong SAR government)
  http://www.microsoft.com/hk/hkscs/ (HKSCS, from Microsoft HK)
  http://www.sinica.edu.tw/~tdbproj/handy1/ (for the Scripta Sinica
    project, from Academia Sinica Computing Centre, a part of Academia
    Sinica, a research insitution, in Taiwan)
  http://www.appledaily.com.hk/ (for Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper)
  http://www.ust.hk/itsc/chinese/infra/eudc/ (for HKUST, a Hong Kong
    university)
  http://www.dynalab.com.hk/font/gaigi.htm (for one of DynaLab's sets,
    from same, a foundry)

etc etc--this is not an exhaustive list. Someone else can probably
provide examples of Japanese or other Chinese ones.

As for whether proposals exist or not, that doesn't matter if one is
concerned about clashes--e.g., many people will avoid using U+F000 ..
U+F0FF because Microsoft Symbol (which itself has multiple variants) and
others already use those codepoints on a widespread scale.

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



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