William Overington wrote in response to Tex Texin.
People might find a control picture style of glyph or several glyphs
useful in the PUA for indicating superscripting or other aspects of
text presentation. For example, if superscripting were represented
as an upwards arrow and end-superscripting a downwards arrow,
then the word "superscript" with superscripted vowels could be
represented in plain text as "s↑u↓p↑e↓rscr↑i↓pt".
Since this sort of visual mark-up can already be accomplished with
standard Unicode, the people who might actually find such notation
useful might choose to use the standard arrow characters for this
purpose. This kind of choice should involve the people who would
actually be the users of such a system.
Indeed, a program designed to display actual superscripts based on
the notational form would work pretty much the same regardless
of whether standard or non-standard characters are used, and the
editing or input screen would also look essentially identical.
> >4) The PUA is for private use, and creating general purpose mechanisms
> >and attempting to assign "standard" values for these mechanisms in the
> >PUA,
>
> Well, standard only amongst those end users who choose to use them, on the
> particular occasions upon which they choose to use them for the particular
> purpose of transcribing into a computer file some particular character from
> a manuscript as a combining above or superscript.
>
"Standard only amongst those end users who choose" seems to be a way of
saying "non-standard".
>
> Well, people can easily use a PUA code for one purpose in one context and
> for a different purpose in another context.
Exactly. This is because PUA code points are, by definition, non-standard.
>
> Yes. However, I feel that it is important to remember that Unicode is
> intended to be used by end users to get the results that those end users
> need.
Unicode is the standard for text encoding. The ability to display text
encoded in Unicode varies, and display issues are not encoding issues.
(Of course, display issues are important, too.)
> The standardization process is very important, yet such facilities as
> the Private Use Area are available for use and I feel that where the Private
> Use Area can be used to solve problems that it is fine to use it.
>
Naturally. In some cases, these solutions may be quite temporary, and
this should be clearly indicated. Other solutions may well be long-term.
> Indeed, in relation to the declared aims of this mailing list, I feel that
> discussion of Private Use Area uses in this list is directly on-topic.
>
This list is for discussing the Unicode Standard. Since PUA is by
definition non-standard, the best we can hope for on this list is
that some people might consider PUA discussions to be only
marginally off-topic.
Short posts announcing news in the realm of PUA issues might even
be welcomed by many list members.
Best regards,
James Kass.
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