Re: ConScript Unicode Registry

On Fri, 2008-04-11 Tristan McLeay wrote:
> Actually,I thought [the private use areas] were appropriate for
> interchanging text as long as you are in agreement with your
> associates as to how it should be interchanged? What other purpose
> are there for PUA characters? (I am aware some fonts put small
>  caps letters in them, or other fancy styles --- this is less than
> optimal and strictly unnecessary especially with modern font
> formats like Open Type.) The CSUR would seem to be appropriate for
> that.
The Unicode manual says
"Private-use characters are often used to implement end-user defined
characters (EUDC), which are common in East Asian computing
environments."
"Systems vendors and/or software developers may need to reserve
some private-use characters for internal use by their software. The
corporate use subarea is the preferred area for such reservations.
Assignments of character semantics in this subarea may be completely
internal, hidden from end users, and used only for vendor-specific
application support, or they may be published as vendor-specific
character assignments available to applications and end users. An
example of the former case would be the assignment of a character code
to a system support operation such as <MOVE> or <COPY>; an example of
the latter case would be the assignment of a character code to a
vendor-specific logo character such as Apple’s apple character."

This is one of the problems with the Conlang Script registry: it ignores
the statement that
"By convention, the primary Private Use Area is divided into a corporate
use subarea for platform writers, starting at U+F8FF and extending
downward in values, and an end-user subarea, starting at U+E000 and
extending upward."
and writes all over the corporate area.

The other problem is that most of the scripts registered sink without
trace. Apart from Tengwar, Cirth, Klingon, and Vedurian, most of the
links given are now broken. There doesn't seem to be much sense in
registering scripts unless there is a real community of users, not just
a proud inventor. I can see why Unicode is cautious.

Incidentally, isn't Open Type just a Microsoft format? I don't know if
it's available for the Mac as well as AAT, but it certainly isn't
available for Linux. Another problem for the CSUR, which assumes the
availability of OT in places.

The CSUR also encodes too much, ignoring the instruction that
punctuation and diacritics should not be duplicated for each script.