Michael Everson wrote as follows. quote
Having said that, you could probably commission someone like me to provide such a list. end quote I read that late last night and I realized that that had not occurred to me. I had a long, quiet, late night think. Yes, I had been thinking that I needed to convince other people that my idea for the list is a good idea, because I feel that there is a need for the list, yet do not have the knowledge to produce it. Yet, I don't need to convince anyone! I can commission the production of the list as a work of art and it can be published and made available on the web and hardcopy versions can be sent to the British Library and so on and the list can just exist as a work of art. If at a later date one or more people choose, free of all charge, to apply the list in content authorship on the DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) interactive television platform then fine. It might then be that a PFR0 font carrying glyphs encoded into the Private Use Area of Unicode starting at, say, U+EC00, in the sequence of the list, could be broadcast via direct broadcast satellites across the whole of the Indian subcontinent and maybe elsewhere around the world as well, for use in conjunction with a eutocode typography file produced from the information in the list so that Indian language texts, broadcast using regular Unicode, could be displayed correctly from a Java program. If the list were used to encode fonts for non-broadcast scenarios, such as in the Private Use Area of a TrueType font, for use with a eutocode typography file, then fine. If the list were used to index and access a list of glyphs within an OpenType font, then fine. It would all assist interoperability at some level. However, the main purpose of the list, to provide the necessary information to produce good typography for languages of the Indian subcontinent within an interactive television environment, with a high level of open portability as between one application and another so that a broadcast font could be used by various content authors, would be achieved and be waiting for the possibility of being used by content authors. I wrote down the following as a title for the work. A numbered list of presentation forms for scripts of the Indian subcontinent together with sequences of Unicode characters which may be used to produce their display. I decided that each item may be described as both I+ a hexadecimal number (that is, a capital I, for India) and J+ a decimal number. For example, a particular item might be both I+001A and J+26 in the list. Item I+0000 J+0 is not assigned an item from the list but is a commissioning plaque, perhaps represented by a glyph with an overall round design like the blue plaques seen on historic buildings, or maybe a glyph with an overall landscape oval design like the works plate on a steam engine. The plaque would carry a distinctive logo which could be included in fonts so that a test application could easily display an indication that the font were based upon the list. In application, the marker point I and J could be mapped to whatever abstract point is desired, such as U+EC00 or glyph 500 of an array of glyphs within an advanced format font, or however is desired for the particular application of the list consistent with any standards with which it may be interfaced. I have in mind that the list would cover everything which would be needed and that it would be set out with scripts in Unicode order and individual items within each script in a dictionary type order as far as possible. If possible the list should have a maximum of 1024 entries, though it can be longer if necessary due to the number of items. There can be unused places in the list so that each script may commence upon a round number hexadecimal boundary. Can you possibly say how much someone might be likely to want to charge for such a commission please? Depending upon the sort of cost of such a list I could then look at the possibilities of how it could be funded. I am thinking that the list could also be applied to produce a sequence of stone carved glyphs, one for each block, in stone blocks around the walls of a building in a typography theme park or of a library. The list would be a work of art which could be useful, and possibly widely applied, for centuries. Michael later added. quote No one would undertake such work for free, methinks. end quote That's fine. We are not a slave society. If my book The Eutotokens of Learning, http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0000.htm gets made into a movie, I will get royalties. I enjoyed writing it and it conveys some of my ideas, yet it is intellectual property and it may make money yet! Copyright is a very important intellectual property right, though for most works it does not last for ever. I think that it would be a good idea if copyrights, when they expire should not expire but should then be such that royalties go to the United Nations for ever to help with health care around the world. Just think, the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan go out of copyright in about two years time, so perhaps they could be the providers of such money. The idea is not perhaps as far fetched as it might at first sound. Please look at the provisions in British Law (in an Act of 1988 about intellectual property I think) where there is a specific provision in relation to the one work Peter Pan. Where the author of a work is a corporation the last seventy years of copyright starts ticking right from publication, so perhaps some of the great movies would soon produce such income. Just an idea at present, but maybe once this posting goes around the world lots of people might think about it and maybe someone can get it done. William Overington 15 March 2003
