William Overington wrote:
> However, there is something that I feel that the Unicode
> Consortium could do, if it so wished, without violating
> that rule. I suggest that the Unicode Consortium could,
> if it so chooses, encode one or more regular unicode
> characters together with a protocol so that an author of
> a file of unicode plain text that uses any of the codes of
> the private use area could, if and only if that author
> chooses to so state, state in a file of plain unicode text
> what meaning the author of that file places upon any
> private use area characters that the author uses.
Suppose that the BMP of Unicode could be used for this
purpose. In other words, why create additional
characters in order to note necessary information for
distribution with a PUA file?
We might agree in principle that it would be a good idea
for anyone publishing material using the PUA to include
a note to that effect. Such a note could appear at the
beginning of the file/document and could use any
character from the BMP. A modest example follows:
<IMPORTANT NOTE:> This file uses characters assigned
to the Private Use Area of Unicode according to the
PUA scheme published at (URL). In order to view this
document, it will be necessary to obtain and install
the (font-name) font from (URL of font provider).
<end IMPORTANT NOTE>
Now, the above example uses English, but the advantage
of being able to use any BMP character within the "tag"
or "note" is that any other modern language could be
used, like Russian, Japanese, or Esperanto.
This approach may offer some advantages:
1) It would work right away.
2) It would provide the essential information.
3) It would not need to be endorsed by any organization.
4) No additional characters would be required.
5) It doesn't attempt to fix anything which isn't broken.
6) Software applications don't have to be re-written.
7) It is human-readable.
8) It is simple.
Best regards,
James Kass.
