Re: The Glowfic Constellation
Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 10:35 am
One potential set of assignments is defined by the ConScript Unicode Registry, for conlangs. Another is used by TinyMCE. It turns out that they conflict. If the font downloading were all set up right nobody would notice.Wikipedia wrote:In Unicode, the Private Use Areas (PUA) are three ranges of code points (U+E000–U+F8FF in the BMP, and in planes 15 and 16) that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. The code points in these areas can not be considered as standardized characters in Unicode itself. They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may define their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Consortium assignments. Under the Unicode Stability Policy, the Private Use Areas will remain allocated for that purpose in all future Unicode versions.
Assignments to Private Use Area characters need not be "private" in the sense of strictly internal to an organisation; a number of assignment schemes have been published by several organisations. Such publication may include a font that supports the definition (showing the glyphs), and software making use of the private-use characters (e.g. a graphics character for a "print document" function). By definition, multiple private parties may assign different characters to the same code point, with the consequence that a user may see one private character from an installed font where a different one was intended.
Also, Unicode does not usually encode formatting (but that wouldn’t stop TinyMCE from using HTML formatting to make bold, italic, and underline symbols, which is what it should have done if it didn’t want to use image icons). However, in mathematics, different formatting options mean different things, so there is a Unicode 'MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL B' (U+1D401) and 'MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL I' (U+1D43C).