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  2. On the wisdom/utility of moving within the PUA

On the wisdom/utility of moving within the PUA #standardization

Nathan Galt
 

It appears that getting registered in the CSUR is difficult to impossible, though. Even if it doesn't carry the same weight, I would personally love to see our Quikscript block submitted to Rebecca Bettencourt's Under-ConScript Unicode Registry. This would at least provide some semblance of (community) standardisation, and a mechanism to prevent different conscripts from occupying the same codepoints.

On that note, I noticed that the location currently used among the Quikscript community (E650-E67F) is already occupied in the UCSUR by another conscript called Sylabica. Would it be prudent for us to move somewhere else, perhaps the next available position: EB60-EB8F? It would be a very simple matter to create a conversion tool for existing texts, and I would be more than happy to modify the existing open-source fonts Thoth, Abbots Morton Experiment and Quikscript Sans.

In order to do a clean break, we’d need to convert all fonts, documents, and tooling to use the new codepoint set and damnatio-memoriae everything that uses the current codepoint set. This involves:

  • modifying all 5–7 fonts in use
  • modifying all Python, etc. scripts that generate/process/check Quikscript texts
  • modifying all Quikscript texts out there
  • modifying all keyboard layouts out there
  • modifying all webpages out there
  • telling confused newbies “don’t use that PUA setup, use the new one in order to see that thing you wanted to see"

In return, we get:

  • a non-overlapping block in the UCSUR
  • the ability to have mixed Quikscript/Sylabica texts

This doesn’t seem worth it.

What’s more, I’m under the impression that software that modifies .ttf/.otf font files directly is incapable of re-saving something of minor importance. I’m not sure if it’s hinting or kerning pairs or something else, but a lossless changeover from the old block to the new might be impossible without the font sources (.glyphs or .sfd or .ufo).

I can’t say I’m in favor, even if it were as easy as running a five-line Perl script on a bunch of documents and calling it a day.
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