Re: Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A

Asmus Freytag wrote:

> Given the history of the character additions in question, which were
> added precisely to allow the STIX project to add them to their font,
> Jukka's answer is unnecessarily dismissive.

If I'm unnecessarily dismissive, how about the Unicode conformance 
requirements:

"C3  A process shall not interpret an unassigned code point as an 
abstract character."

Or the Unicode FAQ:

"Q: Can applications simply use unassigned characters as they wish?
A: No! No conformant Unicode implementation can use the un-encoded 
values outside of the private use area."

If this is not meant to apply to unassigned code points for which an 
assignment has been planned, then the exception should be written loud 
and clear.

> that would result in unnecessary duplicate coding if documents get
> created both with PUA codes (for STIX fonts) and standard codes, for
> any font suite that comes along just a bit later.


This is still about proposed characters, and about characters with very 
limited scope of use (though surely important enough in that scope), so 
I don't see how it would hurt to keep things clear: they are now 
non-Unicode characters, which can be represented in Unicode data by 
private agreements; if and when a new version of the standard containing 
them has been approved, they become Unicode characters that should be 
encoded as indicated, and hence existing data containing them should be 
recoded. It's after all a straightforward operation, needed for limited 
amount of data only. Fonts will need similar adjustments.

The risk of having a character's position changed or removed is probably 
very small if not negligible in this case, but an approach that uses 
unassigned code points would set a bad example.


Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/