2011/8/24 Luke-Jr <[email protected]>: > On Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:29:58 PM Philippe Verdy wrote: >> 2011/8/24 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: >> > (3) which contains the same PUA code point with two meanings >> The only numbered item to sacifice is number (3) here. that's the case >> where separate PUA agreements are still coordinated so that they don't >> use the same PUA assignments. This is the case of PUA greements in the >> Conscript registry. > > Too bad the Conscript registry is censoring assignments the maintainer doesn't > like for unspecified personal reasons, increasing the chances of an overlap.
It's their choice, their private decision. Nobody is required to accept the conditions of CSUR. In fact other groups could be created to coordinate other choices compatible with each other. Even the UTC could create its own PUA registry, probably coordinating it with WG2, and with the IRG, for experimenting new encodings, or working on proposals, helping document the needed features or difficulties, and cooperate better with non-technical people that have good cultural knowledge, or that have access to rare texts or corpus for which there still does not exist any numerisation (scans), or whose numerisation is restricted or not financed, and for which it is also impossible to create OCR versions. In order to get financements, some of those projects would need to exhibit only some fragments, explaining what is found in the rest of the corpus, using significant samples, but also new creating didactic documents, for which PUAs will be needed if they want to interchange with something else than handwritten papers, and photocopies or scans (which are not easy to handle via emails or in HTML pages, or that are to reproduce). Such PUA registry is not required to be stable for extensive periods. Its content will evolve so that the encoded documents will be valid for a limited time. This also means that the necessary fonts required to keep those texts in a legible way (and possible future reencoding, to new PUAs or to standard assignments in the UCS) would have to be kept with those PUA texts. Those fonts should be clearly versioned, containing an expected lifetime for which the PUA registry may warranty some stability (example: the PUA registry will make assignments only by early leases that will need to be renewed by interested people). Note that I clearly want that PUA fonts contain explicitly the character properties needed for proper rendering. Simply because it is expected that PUA documents will be created and interchanged for a limited time. There will be almost no transforms of those texts, only updates to their content via editing. Now which font format will be the best suited for this work with PUA texts? May be OpenType is not the best fit (tools to create them are too complex for most users, and often are too costly, probably a consequence of this complexity that destinate those tools only to very few specialists), when there are simpler formats that are easily editable from more tools (SVG fonts look promising, even if their typographic capabilities are not very advanced for now; I just hope that someday there will be support for this format in more renderers, even if those fonts are larger in size for less glyphs inside; but this SVG format can be easily zipped into a SVGZ format also recognized automatically). But some OSes or applications are offering simple accesory tools to create PUA glyphs stored in personal fonts that can be reedited, embedded, or uploaded to the recipients of a document needing these glyphs. This may be used as an extension to input method editors, notably for entering custom sinograms). Those tools won't let you create glyphs with perfect metrics, or fonts with ligatures/GSUB features, or advanced GPOS'itioning. Drawing tools are minimized to reproduce how we draw basic shapes with the circle head of a pen, of the elliptic head of a pencil, or the thin linear head of some highliting pens. Some other tools just let you use a scan and produce basic shapes.
