Re: Private Use areas

>
> On 29 August 2018 at 06:47 "Janusz S. Bień via Unicode" <unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:
>
> > >
> > Storing this information in a font, by hook or crook, would lock users
> > of those PUA characters into that font. At that rate, you might as well
> > use ASCII-hacked fonts, as we did 25 years ago.
> >
> > >

I don't see that at all. The obvious way in the sfnt format, used by OpenType, is as a table consisting entirely of the XML file. It is quite easy to add a table to an unsigned sfnt font, and even easier to extract a table consisting entirely of UTF-8 text, though ASCII would be even easier, from a font file.

>
> Storing the information in a font is inappropriate not only for thetechnical reasons, as I wrote recently (on Thu, Aug 23 2018)
>
> > >
> > Fonts are for *rendering*, new characters and variants are more and
> > more often needed for *input* of real life old texts with sufficient
> > precision.
> >
> > >

1. There are existing methods of associating a font with a text. Not using a font needs a new scheme for associating a set of PUA properties with a portion of a file. The font also serves as a code chart. It can also hold information on how characters combine, which is notoriously beyond the capability of code charts.

2. Registries can vanish.

3. In practice, a file needs to retain an association with a specialist font. Preserving the font should preserve its content, but there are pruning techniques (e.g. WOFF2) that may remove this content.

Richard.
Received on Thu Aug 30 2018 - 17:34:04 CDT