RE: Endangered Alphabets

On Friday 19 August 2011, Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:
 
> William_J_G Overington <wjgo
> underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com>
> wrote:
>
> > Suppose that a concept of an Endangered Language Code
> Page is invented.
>
> The original Endangered Alphabets subject line was hijacked, almost immediately, into a thread about defining code pages within the Unicode architecture, and then about the PUA.  There really isn't any connection here.  Characters that belong to these "endangered alphabets" should be encoded as normal Unicode characters if they meet the usual criteria. No special mechanism needs to be invented.
 
I was thinking of before they become encoded, or if they do not become encoded and of perhaps assisting keying-in.
 
I was just trying to be helpful. I did think twice before copying the email to the Unicode mailing list, yet I did so in the hope that if the idea was read about that, particularly as it is nearly the weekend, maybe some people who can do things like make and maintain wordprocessing software might join in the discussion and maybe something good would come out of it and help the endangered languages be conserved.
 
Thinking further about the idea, I wondered if it was a sort of way of expressing a private use agreement in a machine-readable manner. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in any way suggesting that all private use agreements should follow that template and I am not suggesting that any registry of Endangered Language Code Page numbers would be run by or recognized by the Unicode Consortium. I simply read of the problem, thought of an idea that might possibly help, did a few tests using FontCreator and WordPad and wrote it up. Hopefully the idea will be of interest.
 
William Overington
 
19 August 2011
 
Received on Fri Aug 19 2011 - 13:01:29 CDT