Choosing the Set of Renderable Strings

[William_J_G Overington via Unicode]

One possibility that might be worth consideration is to map each otherwise unmapped glyph in the font each to a distinct code point in the Private Use Area. This being as well as all of the automated glyph substitution, not instead of it.

This is not an ideal solution and may be regarded by some people as a wrong approach but if an end user of the font is trying to produce a hard copy print out or a PDF (Portable Document Format) document and is stuck because he or she cannot otherwise get the desired glyphs for the desired printable display from the font, the facility of being able to insert a desired glyph from the Private Use Area can get the desired result produced. Certainly, an end user could follow that up with feedback to the font producer so that in due course the display can become producible without needing to use a Private Use Area code point, yet having the glyphs available in the Private Use Area could sometimes be useful when a result is needed straightaway.

William Overington

Monday 14 May 2018

----Original message----
>From : unicode at unicode.org
Date : 2018/05/14 - 07:15 (GMTDT)
To : richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com
Cc : unicode at unicode.org
Subject : Re: Choosing the Set of Renderable Strings

Richard Wordingham asked,

＞ Is this a reasonable approach to allowing both collation
＞ and suppressing needless homographs?  My contribution to
＞ the rendering is only the provision of a font.

If anything about this approach was unreasonable, one of the experts
on this list would probably have pointed it out by now.

Trailblazers such as yourself will help to establish the guidelines you seek.

One does the best that one can in anticipating the character strings
the font will be expected to support, follows the font specs, and puts
the results out there for the public.  Then, the user community, if
any, may provide appropriate feedback to the developers so that
adjustments can be made.

Riding along with the insertion of the dotted circles by the USE
enables the actual users to see immediately that the text needs to be
modified in order to render reasonably on that system with the shaping
engine and font selected.  If users consider any such insertion
inappropriate, then it's feedback time.

＞ ... and it is frequently desirable for a font to be able
＞ to display its own name.

Does the font name have to be in a Latin-based script?