https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=51843
--- Comment #7 from Saašha Metsärantala <[email protected]> --- Hello! Thanks for your reply! Here are a few clarifications! > the vast majority of modern usage, Many, many software do not support non-BMP characters. I would like to clarify that FOP is not the only one. The fact that non-BMP characters are poorly supported is among the main reasons why non-BMP characters are seldom encoded as such. Instead, work-arounds are used. For example, non-BMP characters are often converted to parts of the so called "private use area" (U+E000 to U+F8FF) before being processed. Sometimes, "font-tricks" are used, where the glyphs of one alphabet are just copied to a BMP-alphabet's place -- reminding of the (early) nineties, where greek and cyrillic glyphs (among others) were often living in "ASCII"-fonts. Sometimes, they are replaced by PNG's. All these work-arounds contribute to many confusions and also contribute to the "non-visibility" of these alphabets and to great difficulties to find text written with these character sets. In other words, the poor support for non-BMP characters is indeed one of the main reasons for their "non-visibility". It is important to avoid misinterpretations here: these characters are both used and useful. > demonstrate to me a real, current need to use non-BMP characters To be accepted as part of Unicode, an alphabet or other character set (such as mathematical symbols, etc.) needs to be supported by a VERY active community during a long time. Otherwise, the Unicode consortium does not include this alphabet. The very fact that Unicode includes non-BMP alphabets and other character sets is a proof that an active community needs those characters. On the other hand, the fact that dozens of alphabets are still absent from Unicode shall not be misinterpreted as a non-usage of these alphabets. > adding full CJK support, Thousands of CJK characters live outside the BMP. A full CJK support requires support for non-BMP characters. > If you wish to contribute a patch that adds non-BMP support, I plan to try to write some kind of fix this summer. Regards! Saašha, -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
