Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> I recently found out that there's some sort of "free space" where anyone
> can stick anything -- and someone has stuck in there the Dr. Seuss
> "letters" from *On beyond Zebra* -- except that they are, obviously, not
> "letters," but ligatures of various Roman letters, and they are,
> obviously, not components of any sort of writing system. That's when I
> became inclined to take Unicode less than seriously.

If that is so, then I greatly regret it. It was I who encoded the Seuss
ligatures in the Private Use space; the Unicode Consortium had nothing
to do with it. The whole point of the Private Use area is to encode
things that aren't suitable for public interchange, be they oddball
ligatures, invented scripts, corporate logos, or what have you;
in order to exchange data using Private Use codes, one must define
their meaning.

Note, however, that Unicode proper has a lot of dingbats that
occasionally appear in running text, and as such are encoded, but don't
really form part of a writing system: fleurons and hand-pointers and
circled letters and digits, etc.

--
Not to perambulate || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com
during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
in the boots of ascension. \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel