<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </head> <body><div class="auto-created-dir-div" style="unicode-bidi: embed;" dir="ltr"><p><span style="display: inline;float: none;background-color: rgb(255,255,255);color: rgb(0,0,0);font-family: arial , sans-serif;font-size: 16.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;orphans: 2;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0.0px;text-transform: none;word-spacing: 0.0px;">Mark E. Shoulson wrote:<br><br>> <span style="display: inline;float: none;background-color: rgb(255,255,255);color: rgb(0,0,0);font-family: arial , sans-serif;font-size: 16.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;line-height: normal;orphans: 2;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0.0px;text-transform: none;word-spacing: 0.0px;">Isn't that kind of what the Control Pictures block (U+2400) is?<br>…<br>> <span style="display: inline;float: none;background-color: rgb(255,255,255);color: rgb(0,0,0);font-family: arial , sans-serif;font-size: 16.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;line-height: normal;orphans: 2;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0.0px;text-transform: none;word-spacing: 0.0px;">So if you're willing to do that, go ahead and create a program or protocol that takes the ordinary graphic characters U+2400 through U+2426 and handles them in some special way, creating a new layer on top of plain text.<br><br>Thank you for the suggestion.<br><br>One could indeed use twenty-seven of the characters in the range U+2400 .. U+241F in that manner.<br><br>As a short-term solution it is, in my opinion, a bit better than using a Private Use Area solution, much better than using twenty-seven codes from the range U+0080 .. U+009F and very much better than using twenty-seven codes from the range U+0000 . U+001F.<br><br>However, for long-term storage and archiving of teletext pages within documents that contain notes about them, all of those solutions have problems. They are all essentially markup solutions. I have had similar issues with one of my inventions where encoding into regular Unicode has thus far not been achieved as such encoding has been declared out of scope. Thus I have used various markup solutions in order to make progress. One is to use an integral sign followed by a sequence of circled digits. Another markup solution that I am using is an exclamation mark followed by ordinary digits. Both are effective, but are not regular Unicode plain text solutions. Maybe one day a regular Unicode plain text encoding will be possible. The proposal for the invention to become an international standard is with ISO. There had been a good chance of a slide show that I produced being presented at a plenary conference in June 2020, but the conference was cancelled due to the COVID-19 situation and a virtual meeting replacement has been difficult to hold because of time zone issues. Maybe if ISO decides to standardize the invention as an international standard that it will then be possible to have a rigorous regular Unicode encoding of the codes, thus providing a plain text unambiguous non-proprietary interoperable format.<br><br>I opine that the elegant long-term solution for the teletext control characters is to encode twenty-seven codes from a block of thirty-two code points in plane 14, keeping one-to-one correspondence with the final five bits of the original teletext control code encoding. They could be encoded as displayable characters so as to provide a graceful, helpful, fallback if specialist software to act upon the characters as if they are teletext control characters is not available.</span></span><br><br>William Overington<br><br></span></p><span style="display: inline;float: none;background-color: rgb(255,255,255);color: rgb(0,0,0);font-family: arial , sans-serif;font-size: 16.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;orphans: 2;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0.0px;text-transform: none;word-spacing: 0.0px;"><p>Friday 9 October 2020</p><p><br></p></span><p><br></p></div> </body></html>