Re: Defined Private Use was: SSP default ignorable characters

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 11:26:16 EDT

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    Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:

    > Peter, I disagree with your first premise. There is a clear
    > specification of what the Unicode standard expects as the default for
    > support of the PUA. Each PUA has a default set of properties. All that
    > they lack, apparently, are specific names and reference glyphs; but
    > reference glyphs are not normative as the actual glyphs are always
    > taken from the selected font, and character names are not exactly
    > useful. If the defaults are taken as actual properties, that is a
    > common specification for PUA characters which is not only able to
    > exist but actually does exist. It is not exactly what I want it to be,
    > but that is a separate issue.

    I know you're tired of hearing me pick this particular nit, but:

    The fact that Unicode has defined a set of *default* properties for the
    PUA does not mean they expect all PUA characters to have those
    properties. The defaults were put there simply so that rendering
    software would have some sort of clue how to render them, as opposed to
    no clue at all.

    Having default properties for the PUA neither simplifies nor complicates
    the job of writing software to recognize customized PUA properties, and
    it neither encourages nor discourages software vendors from adding such
    support.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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