Private Use areas

William_J_G Overington via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Tue Aug 28 03:26:12 CDT 2018


Hi
 
Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
 
> I'm not sure what the advantage is of using circled characters instead of plain old ascii.
 
My thinking is that "plain old ascii" might be used in the text encoded in the file. Sometimes a file containing Private Use Area characters is a mix of regular Unicode Latin characters with just a few Private Use Area characters mixed in with them. So my suggestion of using circled characters is for disambiguation purposes. The circled characters in the PUAINFO sequence would not be displayed if a special software program were being used to read in the text file, then act upon the information that is encoded using the circled characters.
 
My thinking is that using this method just adds some encoded information at the start of the text file and does not require the whole document to become designated as a file conformant to a particular markup format.
 
William Overington
 
Tuesday 28 August 2018
 


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