[OT] Bytext (was Re: Encoding ConScripts)

[James Kass]

On 2021-10-14 1:44 AM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> I've been wondering what the need is to tilt at windmills.  There 
> *are* all kinds of ways to make your ConScript/emoji used.  There is 
> the PUA, people use graphics "stickers", there is rich text, there are 
> alternate encodings... if you won't make the effort to make things 
> available to even see if there is interest out there apart from you, 
> if you won't form a community asking for this, why should Unicode?
>
To be fair, William Overington has produced a font with these glyphs and 
made it available to the public.  It's called Mariposa font, which is 
unfortunate because that font name is already registered by a different 
developer.

The font is available here:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/mariposa_novel.htm
(And you don't have to read the novel to download it.)

The font is fixed up to generate glyphs using OpenType substitution of 
ASCII strings in the format of a percentage sign followed by ASCII 
digits.  Since ASCII is covered in Unicode, this material can already be 
interchanged with no action required from Unicode.  Such data is already 
"regular Unicode".

I speculate that little-to-no interest has been generated as yet, but I 
do not have access to the download stats, if any, at William's family 
web site.

I'm mystified at the persistence (or obsession) directed to getting 
these novel abstract symbols enshrined in Unicode when interchange is 
already fully enabled. Alleging that Unicode's principles are somehow 
unfairly preventing his work from being available to the world with 
analogies to rice and pasta isn't compelling.