Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2022 10:57:26 -0800
Ken Whistler via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> On 3/9/2022 10:38 AM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
> >
> > Suppose a proposal works around any IP concerns, real or imaginary,
> > by using generic character names along the lines of CJK ideographs.
> > Such as:
> >
> > U+xxx01  FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT CHARACTER-XXX01
> > U+xxx02  FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT CHARACTER-XXX02
> > and so forth.
> >
> > The charts covering the ranges could be blank with a footnote 
> > explaining that the lack of glyphs is due to IP concerns.  The 
> > proposal could refer to earlier proposals for usage examples and
> > the proposed range need not mention any author's name or
> > copyrighted brands.
> >
> > Would such a proposal have any chance of moving forward towards 
> > acceptance?  
> 
> Well, insofar as this is attempt to "encode" characters without 
> providing reference glyphs or names or any meaningful semantics, it 
> isn't much different from just using:
> 
> U+F0001 <private-use-F0001>
> U+F0002 <private-use-F0002>
> ...
> 
> I don't see the UTC going for this kind of pseudo-private-use
> concept. The whole point of *standardizing* characters is to spell
> out precisely what they are so that interchange is reliable.

But by assigning characters, one can then add meaningful properties.
For example, are the tehtar compulsorily ligated letters (2001 proposal)
or combining marks (earlier, apparent encoding in the CSUR).  The CSUR
appears to lack an encoding for Tengwar - it has a provisional
encoding, which is no better than a font-encoding.

Richard.