On 2018-08-21 08:04, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
On 08/20/2018 03:12 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ via Unicode wrote:
... some people who would call a PUA solution either batty > or
crazy.
I don't think it is either batty or crazy. People can certainly use
the PUA to interchange text (assuming that they have downloaded
fonts and keyboards or some other input method beforehand), and
it can definitely serve as a proof of concept
. Plain symbols — with no interactions between them (like changing
shape with complex scripts), no combining/non-spacing marks, no case
mappings, and so on — are the best possible case for PUA.
It is kind of a bummer, though, that you can't experiment (easily? or
at all?) in the PUA with scripts that have complex behavior, or even
not-so-complex behavior like accents & combining marks, or RTL
direction (here, also, am I speaking true? Is there a block of RTL
PUA also? I guess there's always RLO, but meh.) Still, maybe it
doesn't really matter much: your special-purpose font can treat any
codepoint any way it likes, right?
Not all properties come from the font. For example a Zhuang character
PUA font, which supplements CJK ideographs, does not rotate characters
90 degrees, when change from RTL to vertical display of text.
John Knightley
~mark
