Some brief and not complete answers follow.
> I'm trying to get a grasp on exactly how many planes
> are defined in Unicode
> [...]
> How many planes are defined in Unicode 3.1?
There are 17 planes, and everything will be re-written to reflect that,
eventually. Most of the planes are empty (except for the non-characters).
And two of the planes are full of user-defined private-use characters.
The ISO 10646 standard is being revised (or has been already?) so that
Unicode and 10646 all agree on 17 planes.
Appendix C of Unicode 3.0 talks about planes.
> BTW, it doesn't make sense for every code position
> ending in FFFF or FFFE to be a non character.
Perhaps it doesn't. But as I have said before, in other places:
"If everything made sense, we wouldn't need surrealism to explain it."
> 32 non character
> code values in the arabic presentation form block
Which are those? Can you point to precise codepoint values?
> Why isn't the same rule applied to the hidden non
> characters, so that every code value ending in FDD0 to
> FDEF is also a non character? Is it to contribute to
> their hidden nature?
I don't understand this. What is special about those codepoints?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 19:24:42 EDT