Encoding ConScripts

[William_J_G Overington]

I have written a poem, which I hope will be of interest and possibly of 
help to some people.

Alt sixty thousand on the keys
is E A six zero if you please

The poem is intended as a useful poem, and could be very useful for 
people making fonts, and people using those fonts, where the font 
includes one or more characters in the Private Use Area.

The thing is, for an end user, the getting of a Private Use Area 
character into a document from a font can be awkward at times, 
particularly if one does not have access to much software, such as if 
using a basic Windows system and one is doing what one can using 
WordPad.

So if a font has, say, one non-standard character and that character is 
in the Private Use Area, then placing it at U+EA60 means that when using 
a program such as WordPad one can access that character easily by using 
Alt 60000 as the way to access the character.

Also, if, say, a new script of twenty characters is being added to a 
font, adding the characters starting at U+EA61 allows access from 
WordPad using an Alt code of sixty thousand plus the index number of the 
character in the new script.

Mostly one Private Use Area code point is as good as any other, so if 
people trying to develop a new script choose to add in the characters 
starting at U+EA61 that could be a good choice as, compared with other 
choices, it can, in some circumstances, give better access to the 
characters. In that case the glyph at U+EA60 could be used to provide a 
visual indication of the name of the script.

Choosing to use this method can be helpful in some circumstances, yet 
for people with access to more specialised software the using of this 
method rather than placing the characters elsewhere in the Private Use 
Area does no harm.

William Overington

Monday 18 October 2021


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