...Doug, I don't know who you are accusing of failing to see this distinction, but it certainly isn't me. I have made it very clear several times that I understand that IN PRINCIPLE I am free to write my own operating system, or a large part of it, to display these characters as I wish. The problem is one IN PRACTICE.
The perception that no-one has yet implemented custom PUA properties does not mean that doing so is prohibited or unworkable, any more than the shortage of widely available rendering engines for the Tibetan and Khmer encoding models implies that those models are unworkable.
Failure to see this distinction, between (a) what Unicode allows and prohibits and (b) what software products do and do not support, is doing more to convince us of the hardness of Peter's head than anything else.
Your advice reminds me of the advice that might have been given to Burbage (?) not to hire Shakespeare, but rather to use a team of monkeys because given enough time they would write the same plays - true, but not practical. The ones I am comparing to monkeys are would-be PUA users like myself who are no more capable than monkeys of writing OSs in a sensible time frame. (Sadly there are no OSs in the Shakespeare category.) :-)
But this practical problem would go away (in time, but a lot less time than it would take me to write an OS!) if Unicode specified different DEFAULT (read "only ones supported in any commercial or open source software") properties for parts of the PUA, and the software companies implemented this - which would be trivial if specified.
You claim to have customised the properties of PUA characters. Do you mean that you have written software which processes them according to your customisations? It is easy to list properties. It is very hard to implement them, if one has to start from scratch, without any help from the established manufacturers.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
