From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Apr 27 2004 - 18:59:25 EDT
On 26/04/2004 18:41, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> ...
>
>>Although in principle software may allow these properties to be
>>redefined, in practice no member of the Unicode consortium members has
>>written software which supports such redefinition,
>>
>>
>
>This is incorrect. ...
>
OK, correction: in practice no member of the Unicode consortium members
has provided support for such redefinition in its generally available
software products. Is that true?
> As I have stated before, *I* have written
>such software, and I work for a company which is a member
>of the Unicode Consortium. What I use that redefinition for
>is *internal* to that software, however, and I won't claim
>that I write some end user GUI application that would make
>*you* happy about your intended usage of PUA characters and
>their properties.
>
>
>
>>which makes the
>>redefinition a dead letter.
>>
>>
>
>No, it means that people who want arbitrary redefinitions of
>such character properties have to be able to do the work
>themselves or hire someone to do it for them.
>
>
"*ha! ha! ha!* Yeah, that's a funny one!" I am supposed to rewrite Windows, MacOS or whatever from scratch, or "hire someone to do it" if I have a few billion dollars to spare and a few decades to wait. For the real Windows, MacOS or whatever do not support this kind of redefinition and provide no way for end users to add them. The situation is slightly better with Linux in that at least I wouldn't have to rewrite the whole thing. Get real, Ken!
>
>
> ...
>
>We have, by the way, plowed this field more than once on
>this list.
>
>
>
And we will continue to plough it until you get real, or until users
simply give up on Unicode and do whatever kind of font hacks they want
to do.
> ...
>
>>Thinking about it, perhaps there would be more mileage in allowing the
>>existing tags area, whose use is deprecated,
>>
>>
>
>Discouraged, not deprecated.
>
>
>
>>E0000–E007F so within the
>>default ignorable range, as a kind of private use area.
>>
>>
>
>That would be nonconformant use of the standard, and you could
>predict the results you will get if you go there.
>
>
If users have real requirements which the UTC refuses to meet, users are
forced to not conform to the standard.
>Peter, what "default ignorable" means is that if a rendering
>process does not intepret the character, it should be,
>by default, displayed as nothing, rather than with the
>more normal square box (or similar nondisplayable character
>glyph).
>
>
Precisely. This is the behaviour I am looking for.
>If you want to display characters implemented in the PUA
>at all, then you need a custom font, mapping glyphs from
>the PUA code points you have defined. Anybody else who wants
>to see your data will need that font. ...
>
I know.
>... If you want to
>*simulate* default ignorable code points in your PUA
>usage, then map them to a zero glyph (no image or display
>width at all) in your font. ...
>
The point which I am making is that I want the fallback behaviour with a
regular font to be nothing, rather than a square box or whatever. Text
with lots of extra square boxes scattered over it is very hard to read!
The PUA-type characters which I am wanting to use are either something
like private variation selectors, or else diacritical marks which should
be visible when a particular font is in use, but should disappear when a
standard font is used, without making the basic text unreadable.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 27 2004 - 19:32:42 EDT