>> Maybe someday some of the characters might be promoted to become regular >> unicode characters by the Unicode Consortium, maybe not. > >Not likely. Unicode refuses to encode more ligatures and precomposed >characters. >
Is there an official Unicode Consortium statement that states, for the record, that the Unicode Consortium refuses to encode more ligatures and precomposed characters please? I feel that this is a matter that needs to be formally resolved one way or the other, so that, if such a refusal has been declared then people who wish to have these characters encoded may act knowing that the Unicode Consortium will have legally estopped itself from making any future complaint that it has some right to set the standards in such a matter and that those people who would like to see the problem solved and ligatured characters encoded as single characters so that a font can be produced may proceed accordingly, perhaps approaching the international standards body directly if the Unicode Consortium refuses to do so without a process of even considering individual submissions on their individual merits. On the other hand, if no such formal statement has been issued, then those people who would like to see the problem solved and ligatured characters encoded as single characters so that a font can be produced for use with software such as Microsoft Word may proceed to define characters in the private use area in a manner compatible with their possible promotion to being regular unicode characters in the presentation forms section. The absence of a formal statement coupled to an informal nudge nudge wink wink everybody knows what is meant but it will not be set out as a formal statement is not, in my own opinion, an acceptable situation, so I ask please for formal clarification of the claimed refusal one way or the other. I feel that it would be quite wrong to pull up the ladder on the possibility of adding characters such as the ct ligature as U+FB07 without the possibility of consideration of each case on its merits at the time that a possibility arises. A situation would then exist that several ligatures have been defined as U+FB00 through to U+FB06 including one long s ligature, yet that U+FB07 through to U+FB12 must remain unused even though they could be quite reasonably used for ct and various long s ligatures so as to produce a set of characters that could be used, if desired, for transcribing the typography of an 18th Century printed book. Yet, if the ladder has been pulled up, perhaps U+FB07 can be defined as the ct ligature directly by the international standards organization and the international standards organization could decide directly about including the long s ligatures. If the possibility of fair consideration is, however, still open, then the ct ligature could be defined as U+E707 within the private use area and published as part of an independent private initiative amongst those members of the unicode user community that would like to be able to use that character in a document by the character being encoded as a character in an ordinary font file. That would enable font makers to add in the ct character if they so choose. My point is that the specification purports to lay down the rules, yet there seems to be many other pieces of information that seem to be "understood" on a nudge nudge basis and that words that are in the specification about the private use area such as "published" seem to be overlooked in discussions of using the private use area. It is unfortunate that an attempt to quite happily seek to use the private use area as set out in the specification, where the word "published" is used, seems to become controversialized. William Overington 2 October 2001