"Dominikus Scherkl (MGW)" writes:Absolutely. The difficulties of using the PUA encourage people not to use it, but instead to use various kludges which don't accord with Unicode. Of course the kludges are no more non-conformant than the applications which claim to support Unicode but don't do what the standard clearly states that they should do.
I would expect any application to allow _all_ properties tobe
defined by the user for each and any PUA charakter. If not so, it's a bug in the application! (at least if it can handle charakters with the same properties elsewhere in theUnicode.)
That's a nice theory. But in practice I don't know of a single program that allows you to change the properties of Unicode characters without a recompile. You'd really need a standard format for defining the PUA, because even Unicode geeks would get tired of inputing the various properties by hand into every program.
I think Unicode made the PUA too hard to use, deliberately or through apathy. If there were some standard way to announcing the system being used or even to segregate characters by users, it might be usable. But in practice, cuneiform PUA usage in plain text was broken due to concerns about confusion, and Klingon webpages tend to get their characters mixed with random junk from other pages. It's almost more reliable to use the ASCII or Latin-1 area for your PUA characters than the PUA itself--at least there, the programs won't usually switch fonts randomly.
In the circumstances I shall be forced to advise the person I am helping to use the already defined, but so far unused, variation selectors as if they were PUA variation selectors. These will collate and display as required, i.e. be ignored, with any conformant rendering system. I know this is something which the standard somewhere tells me should not be done, but that doesn't seem to stop Microsoft and others, so why should it stop me?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
