From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 02:06:25 EDT
Patrick Andries wrote as follows.
> [PA] I believe the need of an encoding may be pragmatically ascertained, I
don't known about the « real linguistic value » of an alphabet. I have, by
the way, no problem if someone says : « Sorry, too idiosyncratic and
excentric ! Use the private user area if you need such characters. » This
may well be the case.
I suggest that a good idea would be for you to produce a list of which
characters you would like and encode them as a Private Use Area encoding and
publish the list. That would bring the possibility of being able to use the
characters in a Unicode compatible environment one step closer. If they are
one day promoted to regular Unicode then fine, otherwise there would
nevertheless be a consistent encoding available for anyone who chooses to
use it, which would help in interoperability.
If you choose to encode them in the Private Use Area, it is entirely up to
you which code points you specify within the range U+E000 through to U+F8FF.
However, you might like to take into account the code ranges already being
used by various fonts which use the Private Use Area as avoiding a clash
might increase the chances of the characters becoming added into established
fonts such as Code2000, Gentium and Junicode, as well as being added into
fonts designed specifically for older French texts. If a set of code point
allocations is widely available, then the chances for implementation itself
and implementation in an interoperable manner are increased.
I am wondering whether the range from U+F200 through to U+F2FF is being used
by anyone for anything. So perhaps, if you choose to encode the rare
extinct latin letters in the Private Use Area, if anyone who reads this
knows of whether U+F200 through to U+F2FF is being used by anyone for
anything perhaps he or she might draw attention to the fact in this forum
please.
William Overington
2 June 2003
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