In a recent thread entitled Egyptian Transliteration Characters, a request was made for various characters including the following.
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW There was also a suggestion from a participant in the thread for a character HYPHEN WITH DIARESIS for use in preparing a vocabulary list in German. I have been thinking recently that it would be useful to have presentation forms for a ct ligature character and various long s ligatures so that one may transcribe printed works from the 18th century into unicode while keeping the typographic style intact. There is already U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S and U+FB05 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S T in regular unicode. I am thinking of such characters as LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S LONG S and LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S L and LATIN SMALL LIGATURE LONG S B and so on. There are perhaps about a dozen long s ligatures that could usefully be encoded. In view of these various situations and possibly various others that people might like to post into this thread, I write to put forward the suggestion that as a discussion on this list various users of the unicode specification might like to agree informally a collection of characters called Special Type Sorts Tray 2001 or STST2001 to be defined in the Private Use Area in, say, the range U+E700 through to U+E7FF in the hope that perhaps by there being some informal agreement perhaps someone with a font generating package might like to add them into a font and maybe various small yet significant benefits to the facilities available for encoding text might be achieved. Maybe someday some of the characters might be promoted to become regular unicode characters by the Unicode Consortium, maybe not. I feel that it is better to have available soon rather than not to have available some informal list with some level of agreement amongst users, even if only tacit agreement, so that it is possible to use unicode to encode the various characters for the various purposes. Please know that I am specifically suggesting that this be a discussion amongst the user community: I am not suggesting that the Unicode Consortium endorse this suggestion as I am fully aware that the rules for the use of the Private Use Area specifically say that no assignment to a particular set of characters will ever be endorsed by the Unicode Consortium. So, whilst recognizing that that statement in the specification may not preclude the Unicode Consortium from saying that some particular usage of the Private Use Area is wrong in some way, the absence of any encouragement from the Unicode Consortium over the definition of Special Type Sorts Tray 2001 should not be seen as in any way an objection to it being defined. I declare an interest in the choice of U+E700 to U+E7FF as the range for STST2001 in that I have been defining and publishing, as part of my research, designations for a number of characters in the Private Use Area for a specific application area, namely for use in Java programming for the DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) system and this particular range does not conflict with the codes that I am using in that project, so the choice of U+E700 to U+E7FF as the range would be particularly convenient to me. If anyone is interested to see those definitions then they are in the DVB-MHP section of http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo which is our family webspace in England. There are references in various of the documents, namely the Contemporary introduction, the document about Sequential text files and their applications and in the second and third documents about the Astrolabe Channel numerical pointer. It is hard to even guess how many characters there are that people might like to suggest for STST2001 and maybe there will be only a few and sorts can be added gradually over a number of years, or maybe the tray will be filled up quickly and starting another tray will need to be considered. Hopefully STST2001 will be a useful facility and then when someone chooses to put forward a suggestion for a character to be available then sometimes adding it to STST2001 will be a suitable solution. A solution that someone suggesting a character should allow eight days for discussion and then if the suggestion does not conflict with an existing definition and no good reason has been put forward as to why the suggestion should not be included then the suggestion becomes included in STST2001 would perhaps be suitable. A good reason might be that, unknown to the person making the suggestion, that the character sort is already defined in regular unicode. I feel that a special type sorts tray within the Private Use Area agreed informally by people within the user community would be a very useful facility. William Overington 30 september 2001
