On Friday 19 August 2011, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote:
> William_J_G Overington <wjgo
> underscore 10009 at btinternet dot com>
> wrote:
>
> > Suppose that a concept of an Endangered Language Code
> Page is invented.
>
> The original Endangered Alphabets subject line was hijacked, almost
> immediately, into a thread about defining code pages within the Unicode
> architecture, and then about the PUA. There really isn't any connection
> here. Characters that belong to these "endangered alphabets" should be
> encoded as normal Unicode characters if they meet the usual criteria. No
> special mechanism needs to be invented.
I was thinking of before they become encoded, or if they do not become encoded
and of perhaps assisting keying-in.
I was just trying to be helpful. I did think twice before copying the email to
the Unicode mailing list, yet I did so in the hope that if the idea was read
about that, particularly as it is nearly the weekend, maybe some people who can
do things like make and maintain wordprocessing software might join in the
discussion and maybe something good would come out of it and help the
endangered languages be conserved.
Thinking further about the idea, I wondered if it was a sort of way of
expressing a private use agreement in a machine-readable manner. For the
avoidance of doubt, I am not in any way suggesting that all private use
agreements should follow that template and I am not suggesting that any
registry of Endangered Language Code Page numbers would be run by or recognized
by the Unicode Consortium. I simply read of the problem, thought of an idea
that might possibly help, did a few tests using FontCreator and WordPad and
wrote it up. Hopefully the idea will be of interest.
William Overington
19 August 2011
