At 11:59 +0100 2002-07-06, William Overington wrote:
>Well, may I please suggest that the issue is one for Unicode as well as for
>font technology?
>
>Firstly, for the avoidance of doubt in the matter, whereas I am an advocate
>for adding codes into Unicode for effects for organizing and controlling
>data in ways which some people consider should be done only by markup
>methods,
Stop it, William, please. Stop being an advocate for this. This is
NOT what Unicode is for. Many people have told you this many ttimes.
Either get on board here or go find another game to play. I'm sorry,
but you keep coming back and harping on stuff that you know isn't
going to happen, and shouldn't happen, and it wastes everyone's time
and bandwidth.
>U+F3E0 BLACK
>U+F3E1 BROWN
>U+F3E2 RED
>U+F3E3 ORANGE
>U+F3E4 YELLOW
Your courtyard codes and your scientific chromatic explorations are
not appropriate uses of the standard. With Quark XPress I can set my
fonts to display in HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS if not MILLIONS of colours,
and your ideas about coding this kind of thing are wrong-headed and
you need to stop bothering us with them.
You have a lot of energy, William, and perhaps if you start barking
up the right tree as opposed to the wrong one you can really make a
difference to the standard. But you have, apparently, not understood
that what you are trying to do with character codes is NOT what
character codes are for. If you can't support Unicode on older
systems then that's because the systems aren't good enough. Are PUA
hacks to fix that a productive use of energy? One can't support
everything in legacy data.
>However, I wonder if, even if they are against characters such as U+F3E2
>being promoted to regular Unicode, readers might have a look at whether
>characters such as U+F3DC and U+F3DD should be promoted to regular Unicode
>as they would be used, as operators, in a ZWJ sequence for the character
>which is to be decorated.
Go and learn Aztec and come back to us with proof that BLACK CACTUS
means "thirsty" and RED CACTUS means "spicy" 100% of the time in all
Aztec manuscripts and we will discuss the creation of some sort of
BEGIN RUBRIC and END RUBRIC. But "character decoration" via ligation
is NOT real ligation, is NOT what ZWJ is for, is NOT going to survive
sorting and searching since ZWJ is ignored, is NOT superior to
markup, and is NOT a good use of your time or ours.
My impatience here is not ad hominem, sed ad ideas et ad jacturam.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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