From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Oct 14 2010 - 05:12:37 CDT
David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apparently a tweet before that point is a string of 32-bit integers, including all those wonderful characters above U+10FFFF.
What is the position regarding the 32-bit code point space above U+10FFFF please?
Does the Unicode Consortium and/or ISO or indeed anyone else make any claims upon it?
Reading this thread, it occurs to me that if two localizable text items were defined in the plane 0 Private Use Area, each with a visible glyph and with the intention that they could be localized as a string of ordinary text characters, either in the mind of the reader or by software in receiving browsers, then that could lead to widespread use and maybe lead to the localizable text items and maybe some others becoming encoded, at a later date in regular Unicode, maybe in plane 7 for Unicode 7.0.
LOCALIZABLE TEXT "Good day."
LOCALIZABLE TEXT "Best regards,"
This would have the effect of greeting a person in his or her own native language, which I feel is a pleasant thing to do.
If there is enthusiasm, with the Internationalization and Unicode 34 Conference due next week and no official literary event this year, then maybe the Unicode Consortium, with the assistance of members of this mailing list, could assemble files of "Good day." and "Best regards," in many languages of the world, using Unicode.
There could also be a spontaneous art event if people would like to suggest designs for visible glyphs.
One of the biggest problems for all of this is just which Private Use Area code points to suggest. Although the Unicode Standard rules for using the Private Use Area allow great choice, for practical purpose to try to get something going I feel that they need to be distinct from at least the following groups of Private Use Area code point assignments.
U+F000 to U+F0FF due to clashing with Microsoft Symbol fonts and legacy ligature glyphs for fi and fl.
Any Private Use Area code point used by telephone companies for emoji.
Any Private Use Area code point used in the Code2000 font.
As many as possible of the code points used by MUFI, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, particularly those most commonly being used in fonts generally.
Any other Private Use Area code points that people posting to this thread might feel could cause a clash that could cause practical problems over font usage.
So, choosing Private Use Area code points just to have a go at this is a puzzle in itself, yet a good result would be useful so that hopefully many fonts would gain the glyphs.
William Overington
14 October 2010
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Oct 14 2010 - 05:17:50 CDT