Not safe for what? I've come across six characters that weren't in Unicode at all. Does this mean that Unicode isn't safe to use?
Not safe to *assume* that because a character appears in the pan-Turkic alphabet and is not known to you (or me) from other earlier orthographies, that it was first invented for the pan-Turkic alphabet. Similarly for any other orthographical system. If you *know* when that character was devised, then you are not assuming.
True. But this is not a closed system, where the only characters usable
will be those in the panel. If we ever get texts with the letters, we
can deal with it.
Then I'm puzzled as to the purpose of this proposed subset.
Books before 1923, especially scholarly books concerned with language or mathematics and logic, might contain almost any character currently coded in Unicode as well as characters not currently coded in Unicode including idiosyncratic characters that will never be encoded in Unicode. They are also likely to contain characters from non-Latin scripts and many symbols.
It would take an enormous amount of research to *prove* for many characters that they (and characters with which it would be reasonable to unify them) were *never* used before 1923 in *any* published work, attempting to prove a negative.
Why prescribe a closed subset?
Jim Allan
