>> Maybe someday some of the characters might be promoted to become regular
>> unicode characters by the Unicode Consortium, maybe not.
>
>Not likely. Unicode refuses to encode more ligatures and precomposed
>characters.
>
Is there an official Unicode Consortium statement that states, for the
record, that the Unicode Consortium refuses to encode more ligatures and
precomposed characters please?
I feel that this is a matter that needs to be formally resolved one way or
the other, so that, if such a refusal has been declared then people who wish
to have these characters encoded may act knowing that the Unicode Consortium
will have legally estopped itself from making any future complaint that it
has some right to set the standards in such a matter and that those people
who would like to see the problem solved and ligatured characters encoded as
single characters so that a font can be produced may proceed accordingly,
perhaps approaching the international standards body directly if the Unicode
Consortium refuses to do so without a process of even considering individual
submissions on their individual merits. On the other hand, if no such
formal statement has been issued, then those people who would like to see
the problem solved and ligatured characters encoded as single characters so
that a font can be produced for use with software such as Microsoft Word may
proceed to define characters in the private use area in a manner compatible
with their possible promotion to being regular unicode characters in the
presentation forms section. The absence of a formal statement coupled to an
informal nudge nudge wink wink everybody knows what is meant but it will not
be set out as a formal statement is not, in my own opinion, an acceptable
situation, so I ask please for formal clarification of the claimed refusal
one way or the other.
I feel that it would be quite wrong to pull up the ladder on the possibility
of adding characters such as the ct ligature as U+FB07 without the
possibility of consideration of each case on its merits at the time that a
possibility arises. A situation would then exist that several ligatures
have been defined as U+FB00 through to U+FB06 including one long s ligature,
yet that U+FB07 through to U+FB12 must remain unused even though they could
be quite reasonably used for ct and various long s ligatures so as to
produce a set of characters that could be used, if desired, for transcribing
the typography of an 18th Century printed book. Yet, if the ladder has been
pulled up, perhaps U+FB07 can be defined as the ct ligature directly by the
international standards organization and the international standards
organization could decide directly about including the long s ligatures.
If the possibility of fair consideration is, however, still open, then the
ct ligature could be defined as U+E707 within the private use area and
published as part of an independent private initiative amongst those members
of the unicode user community that would like to be able to use that
character in a document by the character being encoded as a character in an
ordinary font file. That would enable font makers to add in the ct
character if they so choose.
My point is that the specification purports to lay down the rules, yet there
seems to be many other pieces of information that seem to be "understood" on
a nudge nudge basis and that words that are in the specification about the
private use area such as "published" seem to be overlooked in discussions of
using the private use area. It is unfortunate that an attempt to quite
happily seek to use the private use area as set out in the specification,
where the word "published" is used, seems to become controversialized.
William Overington
2 October 2001
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