Re: Tahano Nuhicamu font (was: Re: Keyboards)

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:33:23 -0500, Carsten Becker
<carbeck@...> wrote:

> And Rosta wrote:
>
>> Do I understand this right? You will handdraw 30,000
>> glyphs, scan them in, run them through a font creator
>> (presumably encoding them in Unicode Private Use Area?),
>> and then use Keyman to define deadkey + 30,000
>> alphanumeric strings to map to the glyphs? And you've
>> already done this for 3,000 of them? How is this easier
>> than Inkscaping separate glyphs for the letters and
>> combining diacritics, and putting them into an OpenType or
>> Graphite font? (Not merely a rhetorical question.)
>
> No, no, no! The way I wrote it was misleading. All in all,
> there are about 40 different glyphs, but they can be
> combined in many, many ways due to a plethora of diacritics
[snip]
> As for the encoding, yes, I
> wanted to put my stuff into the Private Use Area, but I
> noticed that it has too few character places -- only 6399.
What about Supplementary Private Use Area A, also known as Plane 15, also
also known as codepoints U+F0000 to U+FFFFF? That's a full 64K codepoints,
and there's another 64K in Supplementary Private Use Area B / Plane 16
(U+100000 to U+10FFFF).

If you can't encode your script in 128K codepoints, I think you need to
think about whether you have an effective writing system, though there are
about 65,530 more Planes of 64K codepoints each that are yet to be
defined, and which probably will not be defined any time soon. It's
naughty, but sometimes you gotta just hope you don't get caught...




Paul