> > No, that's why you include a reference to the font in the private agreement, > so that interested parties can install it and see the special character(s).
People with their iphones and ipads and so forth don’t want to have “private agreements”, they don’t want to “install character sets”. The want it to “just work”. I wish Steve Jobs was here to give this lecture. I highly doubt actually that it is even possible to install a private character set font on an iphone such that it would be available to all applications. This whole discussion is about the fact that it would be technically possible to have private character sets and private agreements that your OS downloads without the user being aware of it. Now if the unicode consortium were to decide on standardising a technological process whereby rendering engines could seamlessly download representations of custom characters without user intervention, no doubt all the vendors would support it, and all the technical mumbo jumbo of installing privately agreed character sets would be something users could leave for the technology to sort out.
