Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] Unicode vs. legacy character sets

[Aaron Bentley]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 13:16, Tom Lord wrote:

> So what I am (tentatively) willing to do is this: if there's enough
> programmers who both (a) want to help with my software and (b) are
> against unification -- I'm willing to have libhackerlab (hence Pika
> and arch) use an _extended_ Unicode.  Standardizing, within those
> libraries and programs on assigning-by-convention some private-use
> codepoints to un-unified characters.

I'm an ignorant English speaker, but would it be possible to make the
private characters be combining character?  That is, you'd have a
combining character to indicate that the next character is Chinese,
Japanese, or Korean, then use the unified Han character.

> That wouldn't provide interoperability with everything in the world --
> far from it.   For example, it would be (at best) a long time before
> browsers would recognize the non-standard characters.  

That way, the raw output would be legible (though ugly) for non-savvy
programs, and conversion to standard Unicode would be a matter of
deleting the combining characters.

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.