RE: RTL PUA?

I don't buy the assumption that all the world is either AAT, Graphite or Uniscribe.

Anyhow, this discussion is going off topic, the issue is should Unicode specify an RTL PUA area, not whether some products, however respectable, provide a bypass.

Jony

> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org] On
> Behalf Of Shriramana Sharma
> Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 8:12 AM
> To: unicode_at_unicode.org
> Subject: Re: RTL PUA?
>
> On 08/22/2011 08:24 AM, Peter Constable wrote:
> > I'm not saying that there shouldn't be_some_ software that can do
> > what you expect. But there will likely be some different views on
> > what ought to be included within that "some".
>
> Peter, given that both AAT and Graphite have provisions for assigning
> custom properties including BC to PUA characters, it seems Uniscribe is
> the only one missing out. Those advocating RTL PUA areas seem to reject
> AAT and Graphite as "hacks" or "wow *one* application" [*].
>
> [* = LibreOffice is the *only* multipurpose application running on
> /Windows/ to support Graphite and I'm not counting SIL WorldPad. On *nix
> platforms, *any* number of applications that use HB-NG for rendering
> will be able to handle Graphite in the near future because HB-Graphite
> integration is already done. That is to say, once GTK and Qt fully
> switch to HB-NG.]
>
> Anyhow, if you Microsoft guys added support in Uniscribe for ascribing
> custom properties including BC to PUA characters (or have you already
> done it) it would be what would satisfy these PUA RTL users and convince
> them that no RTL PUA zones are needed, it seems.
>
> The suggestion has been made that fonts should be able to carry some
> additional custom tables specifying custom properties for PUA
> characters, which seems reasonable. I'm not sure if the OT GDEF table or
> the AAT PROP table completely satisfies this requirement. People
> interesting in using custom properties for the PUA (which includes me
> for Indic script) should then sit up and formulate the syntax for such
> tables.
>
> If Uniscribe, AAT, and Harfbuzz then provided generic support for
> parsing such tables and rendering PUA characters accordingly, it would
> be an all-around solution both for RTL PUA as well as Indic PUA, I
> suppose. (But I'm not sure how such a custom table would interact with
> the innate ability of Graphite to handle custom properties. It should
> probably be either the new proposed custom table or Graphite.)
>
> [sigh]
>
> --
> Shriramana Sharma
Received on Mon Aug 22 2011 - 01:55:11 CDT