Chris Jacobs schreef: > If I interpret a B font declaration on a webpage as a private agreement > that for data in that font on that webpage a PUA will be used were U+E000 is > a banana that does not imply that I claim anything about which PUA I use for > other purposes.
You keep making it more and more difficult for the rest of us to follow you. To start with, your use of "PUA" is not what is generally meant by "PUA". There is no such thing as "a" PUA; there is only one Private Use Area, which consist of all the codepoints that will not be assigned a specific use by the Unicode Consortium. You cannot say that the range of codepoints U+E000..U+E0FF is a different PUA than U+E100..U+E1FF. Secondly, you must be aware there is not, and will not be, a rule about what characters in that area should look like. Yet you insist on trying to convince everybody it's a good idea to remap, for example "banana" to U+E100, even if the font calls it U+E000. You keep on about what a good idea it would be to be able to rearrange code points such that no matter how many fonts you have in use, there is always a banana at U+E100. This is a restriction, an unwelcome intrusion on the PUA! You also can't seem to decide if this is just something you want to do on your own computer, or if you also want to use this scheme for information interchange with other users. Now what you do in the privacy of your own home is none of our concern, but when communicating with the outside world, there are certain rules and guidelines you should abide by. And one of those guidelines is a plaintext file should not have PUA characters in them, unless its author also specifies it should be displayed using a certain font. Now if the font it should use is known, the proper codepoint to display this banana of yours is also known, because this info is in the font. Ergo, no need to remap! Since not all fonts have a banana, it really doesn't make much sense to not specify a font. The computer wouldn't know what to do! Lastly, I must say I think it's a pity that the suggestion I made yesterday has been ignored so quietly. You know, in a HTML environment, to retrieve names for characters from the font file itself, to relieve the author from the task of having to enter numerical values. For an example, suppose you have a font named "Tengwar Quenya", with a character named "hwesta" at U+E00B, you could use it in an XML file by defining an entity, <!ENTITY hwesta "">. Now my suggestion was the browser program which displays this file should be able to look at the font information in the XML file, open the font file and retrieve the names of all characters in it, so it can show the "&hwesta;" character (and all other characters) without needing a long list of ENTITY entries in the XML. Anyone else think this would be a good idea? Pim Blokland
