>This is just one of the possible uses of PUA, and one that
does not cause PUA code points to be stored or transmitted.
What's wrong with it?
Some possible concerns:
- This entails creating fonts that have the presentation form
glyphs accessible in the cmap via PUA codepoints. That, in
turn, means that users *could* encode documents in terms of
those presentation forms, and that very likely means that some
users will do so. And those documents are only interchangeable
with others that follow the same use of the PUA.
- Smart font technologies, such as AAT and OpenType, can handle
complex script rendering without making use of PUA codepoints,
and also provide additional benefits (e.g. supporting features
such as multiple levels of ligation). Software that uses an
algorithm such as you described will be limited to only
proprietary fonts, and misses out on the benefits provided by
smart font technologies.
- Since such a font contains presetation forms for Arabic (or
Bengali, or whatever) encoded in the PUA, then its ability to
support custom characters that an end user might need is
limited (depending upon the number of PUA codepoints consumed).
Not to say that, therefore, this shouldn't be done. This is
certainly a valid use of the PUA. Any attempt to get widespread
adoption within industry of any particular use of the PUA,
however, is a bad idea.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:59 EDT