William,
It looks like if you really want multilingual support that you need to run
your text through a layout engine. If that is the case then you can remap
certain characters or character combinations into the U+FDD0 to U+FDEF
Unicode range and use this special non-character area for what ever purpose
the font and layout engine needs.
If the private area becomes standardized then it is no longer a private
area.
Carl
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
> Behalf Of William Overington
> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 9:00 AM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Cc: Spencer_Tasker@rcomext.com; dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org;
> archive@ngo.globalnet.co.uk
> Subject: Special Type Sorts Tray 2001 (derives from Egyptian
> Transliteration Characters)
>
>
> In a recent thread entitled Egyptian Transliteration Characters, a request
> was made for various characters including the following.
>
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW
> LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW
>
> There was also a suggestion from a participant in the thread for
> a character
> HYPHEN WITH DIARESIS for use in preparing a vocabulary list in German.
>
> I have been thinking recently that it would be useful to have presentation
> forms for a ct ligature character and various long s ligatures so that one
> may transcribe printed works from the 18th century into unicode while
> keeping the typographic style intact.
>
> There is already U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S and U+FB05 LATIN SMALL
> LIGATURE LONG S T in regular unicode.
>
> I am thinking of such characters as LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S LONG S and
> LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S L and LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S B and so on.
> There are perhaps about a dozen long s ligatures that could usefully be
> encoded.
>
> In view of these various situations and possibly various others
> that people
> might like to post into this thread, I write to put forward the suggestion
> that as a discussion on this list various users of the unicode
> specification might like to agree informally a collection of characters
> called Special Type Sorts Tray 2001 or STST2001 to be defined in
> the Private
> Use Area in, say, the range U+E700 through to U+E7FF in the hope that
> perhaps by there being some informal agreement perhaps someone with a font
> generating package might like to add them into a font and maybe various
> small yet significant benefits to the facilities available for
> encoding text
> might be achieved.
>
> Maybe someday some of the characters might be promoted to become regular
> unicode characters by the Unicode Consortium, maybe not. I feel
> that it is
> better to have available soon rather than not to have available some
> informal list with some level of agreement amongst users, even if
> only tacit
> agreement, so that it is possible to use unicode to encode the various
> characters for the various purposes.
>
> Please know that I am specifically suggesting that this be a discussion
> amongst the user community: I am not suggesting that the Unicode
> Consortium
> endorse this suggestion as I am fully aware that the rules for the use of
> the Private Use Area specifically say that no assignment to a
> particular set
> of characters will ever be endorsed by the Unicode Consortium. So, whilst
> recognizing that that statement in the specification may not preclude the
> Unicode Consortium from saying that some particular usage of the
> Private Use
> Area is wrong in some way, the absence of any encouragement from
> the Unicode
> Consortium over the definition of Special Type Sorts Tray 2001
> should not be
> seen as in any way an objection to it being defined.
>
> I declare an interest in the choice of U+E700 to U+E7FF as the range for
> STST2001 in that I have been defining and publishing, as part of my
> research, designations for a number of characters in the Private Use Area
> for a specific application area, namely for use in Java
> programming for the
> DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) system and
> this particular range does not conflict with the codes that I am using in
> that project, so the choice of U+E700 to U+E7FF as the range would be
> particularly convenient to me. If anyone is interested to see those
> definitions then they are in the DVB-MHP section of
> http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo which is our family webspace in
> England. There are references in various of the documents, namely the
> Contemporary introduction, the document about Sequential text files and
> their applications and in the second and third documents about
> the Astrolabe
> Channel numerical pointer.
>
> It is hard to even guess how many characters there are that people might
> like to suggest for STST2001 and maybe there will be only a few and sorts
> can be added gradually over a number of years, or maybe the tray will be
> filled up quickly and starting another tray will need to be considered.
> Hopefully STST2001 will be a useful facility and then when someone chooses
> to put forward a suggestion for a character to be available then sometimes
> adding it to STST2001 will be a suitable solution. A solution
> that someone
> suggesting a character should allow eight days for discussion and then if
> the suggestion does not conflict with an existing definition and no good
> reason has been put forward as to why the suggestion should not
> be included
> then the suggestion becomes included in STST2001 would perhaps be
> suitable.
> A good reason might be that, unknown to the person making the suggestion,
> that the character sort is already defined in regular unicode.
>
> I feel that a special type sorts tray within the Private Use Area agreed
> informally by people within the user community would be a very useful
> facility.
>
> William Overington
>
> 30 september 2001
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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