Re: Special Type Sorts Tray 2001

From: DougEwell2@cs.com
Date: Sun Sep 30 2001 - 14:22:56 EDT


In a message dated 2001-09-30 9:19:31 Pacific Daylight Time,
WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk writes:

> 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.

As mentioned, this can already be done with ZWJ, although fonts may not be
able to render it correctly. (But this is always true for any newly added
glyph, no matter how 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.

You might want to take a look at the ConScript Unicode Registry, which was
originally intended for "constructed" and artificial scripts, but which could
also be used for this purpose.

> 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.

OK, then ConScript might be a suitable venue for this proposed encoding after
all.

> 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,

This range is already taken in ConScript, but several other ranges are
available, and as David mentioned, you'll probably need a lot more than 256
code points.

ConScript is the work of Michael Everson and John Cowan. You should check
with them.

http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/index.html
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/conscript-table.html

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Sep 30 2001 - 13:33:51 EDT