A couple of quick questions for folks: One effect of Unicode Consortium's rigorous proposal/review policy is that while a particular script or group of characters may not be adopted into Unicode for a couple of years after it is proposed, font makers usually don't get around to creating the fonts for those scripts until after they have been officially approved for Unicode.
Would it be a misuse of the PUA to come up with a private agreement within a community to assign certain codepoints in the PUA to characters that have been propsed to the Unicode Consortium, but not yet approved, so that font designers and others in that community could get to work on establishing support for these characters, and so that content providers can begin the process of incorporating these characters into their content? Would it be useful/practial for such an agreement to stipulate a versioning system whereby the font creators &c. and content providers in that community who wish to use the PUA mapping in question would have to release new versions of their products with the characters remapped to the approved codepoints upon the acceptance of the characters in Unicode (and with the PUA codepoints being obsolesced, and eventually removed, in subsequent versions of the agreement assignments, until all characters were assigned by the Unicode Consortium)? This would I think considerably shorten the amount of time it would take for characters to become usable to a community after they had been accepted into Unicode, and would also provide a mechanism for the gradual introduction of "new" characters, while the versioning system would (I'd hope) prevent PUA code points from being used long after perfectly good permenent code points have been assigned. The idea, too, would be that the font creators and content providers using the agreement would all cooperate in the creation of tools that would make it easy to upgrade content from version to version (i.e., write scripts to convert the PUA code points to the newly assigned permanent code points, and that these tools would be distributed together in a package licensed compatably with the content providers' code. Yes, I know about ConScript. I'm just checking to see that I'm making my analogy from ConScript properly. Second, is ConScript (I know ConScript isn't a Unicode Consortium resource, but since the two principals are on this list . . .) staying limited to "constructed scripts," or is it also accepting "natural" or "evolved" scripts that for one reason or another haven't been accepted into Unicode yet (one thinks of e.g. Old Persian, already mentioned)? If not, are there analogous resources to ConScript for such "natural" scripts? The ideal would of course be to avoid conflicts between overlapping user communities, and while the community I have in mind doesn't overlap much with that of ConScript, there might be others that it does overlap with considerably. While ConScript doesn't look like it was intended for the purpose I have in mind, it is pretty analogous. I'm particularly interested in any reasons why this would be a bad idea in a scholarly community (in other words, I'm convinced that it would work, given careful planning, but need to expose the idea to some hostile fire to see if it can stand up). The main issue I can think of is the matter of rejected characters: what does one do if a character is rejected by the Unicode Consortium for valid reasons? Delete it from the agreement, and have to remove a distinction from the character data of the content providers? Leave it there, and so perpetuate some final version of the agreement for all time, as a kind of extension to Unicode? Thanks, Patrick Rourke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
