Kenneth Whistler replied to my posting as follows. >> An interesting point for consideration is as to whether the following >> sequence is permitted in interchanged documents. >> >> U+FFF9 U+FFFC U+FFFA Temperature variation with time. U+FFFB >> >> That is, the annotated text is an object replacement character and the >> annotation is a caption for a graphic. > >Yes, permitted.
Great. That may well be useful for free to the end user distance education using telesoftware upon digital television channels. A .uof file (as in the thread An idea for keeping U+FFFC usable. ) could be used with a Unicode plain text file of some learning material over the broadcast link and a Java program (also broadcast) could place the pictures with their captions in the correct place in the text. >As would also be: > >U+FFF9 U+FFFC U+FFFC U+FFFA U+FFF9 Temperature U+FFFA a measure of >hotness, related to the U+FFF9 kinetic energy U+FFFA energy of motion U+FFFB >of molecules of a substance U+FFFB U+FFF9 variation U+FFFA rate of change >U+FFFB with time U+FFFC . U+FFFB > >Where the first U+FFFC is associated with a URL with a realtime data feed, >the second U+FFFC is a jar file for a 3-dimensional dynamic display algorithm, >and the third U+FFFC is a banner ad for Swatch watches. > Thank you for this example. I have analysed it thoroughly using Notepad by going to a new line and indenting at each occurrence of U+FFF9 and going to a new line and indenting at each occurrence of U+FFFA, and going to a new line and placing each U+FFFB beneath the corresponding U+FFFA. For each U+FFFC I went to a new line, and placed the U+FFFC beneath the most recent U+FFF9 or U+FFFA character. In addition, after each U+FFF. character, for "ordinary" text, I went to a new line and indented so that the next "ordinary" text character was beneath the U of the most recently entered U+FFF. character, except that after a U+FFFB the indentation went back two indentation levels. After each U+FFFC character, and on the same line, I added the details of the object within parentheses. This gave the following. U+FFF9 U+FFFC (URL with a realtime data feed) U+FFFC (jar file for a 3-dimensional dynamic display algorithm) U+FFFA U+FFF9 Temperature U+FFFA a measure of hotness, related to the U+FFF9 kinetic energy U+FFFA energy of motion U+FFFB of molecules of a substance U+FFFB U+FFF9 variation U+FFFA rate of change U+FFFB with time U+FFFC (banner ad for Swatch watches) . U+FFFB This took me quite some time to figure out, and was indeed an interesting challenge. >> It seems to me that if that is indeed permissible that it could potentially >> be a useful facility. I was referring to my original example, not to your example! :-) > >Permissible does not imply useful, however, in this case. That's referring to your example when you refer to "this case" is it? :-) It is >unlikely that you are going to have access to software that would >unscramble such layering in purported "plain" text, even if you >had agreements with your receivers. Hmm? Yet, it is not the example to which I referred. The example to which I referred has not been commented upon as to its practical feasibility has it? However, is your example that difficult if someone set his or her mind to it? Consider for example that the software which does the unscrambling were to have its own internal list of annotation facilitating characters so that it assigned, for each page of the final rendered text, the characters in the list of annotation facilitating characters in order for each U+FFF9 U+FFFA pairing wherever the U+FFF9 item to be annotated were other than just one or more U+FFFC characters. The list of annotation facilitating characters could be something like U+002A, U+2020, U+2021, U+2051, that is, asterisk, dagger, double dagger, two asterisks aligned vertically. The annotation facilitating character is then placed both after the annotated item and before the annotation, wherever that may be on the page, such as in a footnote. I am not suggesting that an algorithm for such is quickly programmable, yet it does not seem on the face of it to be as unlikely to be possible as your comment might perhaps seem to imply. >That is what markup and rich text formats are for. Well, maybe for your example, yet for my example a plain text file for the main text together with a .uof file to state the name of the graphic file would seem perfectly suitable. Then there is this curious passage. >Note that it is also *permissible* in Unicode to spell "permissible" >as "purrmisuhbal". That doesn't mean that it would be a good idea >to do so, but the standard does not preclude you from doing so. >You could even write a rendering algorithm which would display the >sequence of Unicode characters <p,u,r,r,m,i,s,u,h,b,a,l> with the glyphs >{permissible} if you so choose. > >--Ken > Well, who is this "you", certainly not me! :-) Thank you for your response, which has been very helpful. William Overington 16 August 2002