From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 06:10:35 EDT
On 14/07/2003 02:15, Tex Texin wrote:
>William,
>
>You understand Unicode well enough by now, to know that this is an abhorent
>suggestion.
>
>As the characters can be represented in Unicode by using Cyrillic plus
>combining diacriticals, to create a proprietary set of codes in the Private
>Use Area would introduce incompatibilities with other applications that
>support these characters in the recommended form. Following your
>recommendation would cause searching, sorting and interchange of Vladimir's
>data to fail in applications that properly support these characters. And it is
>likely difficult to get other applications to buy into supporting a
>proprietary solution. It is easier to address the rendering problem that
>Vladimir has than to unravel the mess your suggestion would create. It isn't
>even a good recommendation for short term use.
>
>Did I miss something? Why are you recommending the PUA for this use?
>
>tex
>
>
>
>
I agree with Tex that William's is an abhorrent suggestion.
But one part of it might be rescued, if I understand rendering
technologies correctly. Internally within a font only, Vladimir may
define glyphs for his precomposed characters and assign PUA code points
to them. In fact this seems to be how MS deals with some Hebrew
presentation forms (ones which aren't in FB1D-FB4F) in Times New Roman.
Then it can be part of the rendering technology Vladimir uses to
substitute for the standard Unicode for his letter-accent combinations
the PUA codes for the precomposed glyphs. For example, on a Microsoft
system this may be included in an OpenType table, and Uniscribe (but
only the soon to be released version which can process Cyrillic text)
will perform the required glyph substitution. The PUA codes would never
be used outside the font and rendering processor, and so their use is
appropriately private. But then in such a system OpenType and Uniscribe
could be set up to position the diacritic correctly without a
precomposed glyph.
One further advantage of this over any approach using PUA for data
interchange is that users who don't have the appropriate font and
version of Uniscribe, or are using an OS which doesn't support this or
an equivalent, will be able to read the text (they won't get spaces or
square boxes) even though (as in Vladimir's examples) the diacritic
placement will not be ideal.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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