> Um... Computers are hardware, and don't understand a thing. What I think you > mean is computer _software_. (I know, I'm being pedantic, but with good > reason.)
Sorry, I just can’t resist pointing out that difference between hardware and software is only the fact that the former is material, with all the consequences that follows. In any other way they are completely interchangeable. As for the other part of your mail, Peter, sorry, but it really doesn’t make any sense to me. As John has pointed out, you can adjust the properties of private use characters on Apple computers. Perhaps there is a way to do so on Windows, Unix and other systems as well. What Philippe and Doug are proposing, and I also strongly agree with, is to have a standard way of interchange of these properties. I don’t think it is neccessary to go into the advantages of standards. Speaking of actual implementation, I’m convinced that this format should be the same as it is for encoded characters (whether it is the plain text format of the Unicode Character Database, XML or anything else). Rendering engines should – maybe they already do so – accept multiple files containing character properties, which could make upgrades to the newer versions of the standard a matter of downloading the new standard set, and provide a way of overriding private use (or even standard if one is so inclined) characters’ properties. Introduction of unencoded scripts would therefore become a matter of distributing a small properties file and the corresponding fonts. Á
