Re: Private Use areas

[William_J_G Overington via Unicode]

Hi
 
Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
 
> I'm not sure what the advantage is of using circled characters instead of 
> plain old ascii.
 
My thinking is that "plain old ascii" might be used in the text encoded in the 
file. Sometimes a file containing Private Use Area characters is a mix of 
regular Unicode Latin characters with just a few Private Use Area characters 
mixed in with them. So my suggestion of using circled characters is for 
disambiguation purposes. The circled characters in the PUAINFO sequence would 
not be displayed if a special software program were being used to read in the 
text file, then act upon the information that is encoded using the circled 
characters.
 
My thinking is that using this method just adds some encoded information at the 
start of the text file and does not require the whole document to become 
designated as a file conformant to a particular markup format.
 
William Overington
 
Tuesday 28 August 2018