From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 31 2004 - 02:30:29 EST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
To: "Unicode Mailing List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Cc: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>; <peterkirk@qaya.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 8:38 AM
Subject: PUA properties, default or otherwise (was: Re: What is the principle?)
> This discussion has focused pretty tightly on the *default* properties
> of PUA code points, without really addressing the issue of specifying
> new properties to override those defaults, and I think that's a mistake.
Exactly what I was saying. But you had more arguments for my remark.
> But Ken and Rick
> are absolutely right that very few companies are going to see a business
> opportunity in this. Even SC UniPad, which has implemented many
> comparatively arcane features of Unicode, has never done anything with
> the PUA, though it has been on their "future versions" list for 6 years
> now.
One of the main reason may be that they are exactly limited by the lack of
accurate properties for PUAs.
But I see no reason why there could not exist an interoperable format to send
these properties.
In proposed to include that information in fonts (notably OpenType), but it may
also be sent separately (in a font without the glyphs?)
Of course we can argue that some of the missing features may in some cases be
encoded directly within the maintext (for example by using RLO/PDF controls in
the plain-text to override the BiDi properties.
I also don't think that such application is only for idiosyncratic characters.
There are LOTS of scripts on earth that will probably never go to the scrutiny
of Unicode, but that users may wish to start studying in a interoperable way
with common reusable technical solutions to creater the documents they need. You
may think that using some rich text format (Word DOC, Acrobat PDF, HTML+SVG...)
would paliate the lack of standardization. But I do think that there is still
some place for plain texts.
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