Windows keyboard restrictions

[Richard Wordingham]

On Thu, 06 Aug 2015 10:56:51 -0700
"Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> wrote:
> 
> > The UK has been discussing whether a certain user-perceived
> > character should be encoded as a single character in a new script.
> > Users ought to have this character on their keyboards, but there is
> > a worry about technical problems if it is encoded as a sequence of
> > three characters, i.e. six UTF-16 code units.
> 
> What is this character? Is it currently encoded as three SMP
> characters? What are they?

It's part of an unencoded, living script.  There is no suitable
contiguous place for the script in the BMP.  There is a set of
characters within the script that appear to be sequences of three
characters, and encoding these characters as single elements almost
makes about as much sense as encoding English <wh> on the basis that it
represents the sound [hw], not the sound [wh].  Several of the
sequences of three characters occur in the region's language of high
culture and religion, which apparently is also written in the script.

The 'UK has been discussing' means there has been discussion of what
position the UK should take over this set of characters in the ISO
10646 amendment process.

Richard.