It certainly is exciting! I learn a lot from your fun Doug. I remember when we had The Respectfully Experiment and I asked you how you managed to get the U+E707 character into your message and you mentioned the SC UniPad program from the http://www.unipad.org webspace. That program is very useful for various purposes, I have used it in relation to preparing text with colour codes for research about broadcasting and indeed I have been using it to analyze the output from using your MathText program.
Some information about the colour code experiments, and a link to a font with which one can experiment, are in the following web page. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7001.htm I used a file, produced using Notepad, named mathin.txt with the following text. This is a test. I processed this file through MathText using the Fraktur style using mathout.txt as the output file. I then used File | Open in SC UniPad to open the file mathout.txt as a UTF-8 file. There was the display in Fraktur letters. Wow! So, I then did an Edit | Select All on the Fraktur text, followed by an Edit | Convert | Unicode to UCN. This gave a stream of ordinary text in \u and \U format, each \u sequence having four hexadecimal characters after the \u and each \U sequence having eight hexadecimal characters after the \U. Wow again! I did not realize that SC UniPad would do such a conversion! These tests were carried out on a PC running Windows 98. I am now wondering whether I can convert the text into surrogate pairs so that I can both read the \u sequences for the surrogate pairs in SC UniPad and so that I can copy the surrogate characters themselves onto the clipboard for pasting into the text box of a Java applet. Have you considered the possibility of a similar program to encode a string of ASCII characters as plane 14 tags please, with an option checkbox to include the U+E0001 character at the start and an option checkbox to include a U+E007F character? That would be a very useful program which could be used in conjunction with SC UniPad to marshall plain text which uses language tags. Such a program would be a very useful tool to have available for access level content production for use for producing content for free to the end user distance education for broadcasting around the world upon the DVB-MHP platform for interactive television. Recently I was thinking about the possibility of defining a few Private Use Area characters in one or both of planes 15 and 16. This being so as to try to gain experience of applying those Private Use Areas "up in the mountains" for use if and when such use becomes desirable. I am thinking of the long term possibility of a music font being defined there as one possible application. However, for the moment, something more general, such as a few symbols for vegetables, just to gain experience of what is involved. For example, how would one produce a display (not necessarily a web page display) of the text of the following song together with a few graphics of vegetables if the whole document were encoded as plain text with the illustrations of the vegetables encoded as Private Use Area characters from plane 15 or plane 16? http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/song1015.htm As a direct consequence of using SC UniPad with characters from beyond plane 0 as a result of your posting I have found that the CTRL Q facility of SC UniPad may be used to enter five and six character hexadecimal sequences which are within the Unicode code space and that such characters may then be converted to the \U and eight hexadecimal characters format. Looking at the U1D400.pdf document for which you provided a link in your document about the program and considering the MathText dialogue box, I am wondering whether one can set out on with an ASCII file produced with Notepad and use MathText to reach the various mathematical Greek characters shown in the U1D400.pdf document. Is that possible at present? I tried with an Alt 130 and an Alt 225 in the .txt file following A and B and before C and D and requested Bold of MathText just to see what happened, but only the A and B came out. Thank you for posting details of an interesting program which is a catalyst for interest in applying the higher planes of Unicode. William Overington 3 April 2003