RE: more dingbats in plain text

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Sat Apr 18 2009 - 21:43:05 CDT

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    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell

    >> Not 100% true. These fonts are encoded in a encoding called
    >> "symbol" -- which means a font-specific encoding. The Symbol encoding
    >> uses a 16-bit representation in the fonts, and typically fonts have
    >> characters mapped from F020 to F0FF. It looks a lot like Unicode PUA,
    >> though strictly speaking it is not.

    > The duck test tends to support Chris. When I type :) into a Word 2003
    > file (thus changing it to the smiley-face Wingding) and copy and paste
    > it into BabelPad, a plain-text but very Unicode-aware editor, BabelPad
    > tells me the character (with font information stripped) is U+F04A. This
    > is within the Unicode PUA, even if Microsoft has a different
    > interpretation of what is going on.

    You have interpreted things in a certain way, but the raw evidence doesn't support all that you take it to imply. Strictly speaking, all that you can deduce from the evidence is that the character pasted into BabelPad is represented in BabelPad as U+F04A, a Unicode PUA character. That doesn't mean that that is the way it is being represented everywhere else.

    Chris' statement was a general claim: symbol fonts use Unicode PUA. What I said is that general claim is not 100% true, and specifically that is not true for the fonts themselves -- which isn't a matter of interpretation but is plainly clear from the font data and the TrueType or OpenType specifications.

    Peter



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