bug#32599: 25.2; Feature request: input PUA characters by name

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: jsbien@mimuw.edu.pl (Janusz S. Bień)
> Cc: 32599@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 27 May 2019 07:48:38 +0200
> 
> On Sun, May 26 2019 at 21:52 +03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Personally, I'm surprised people use PUA for
> > these purposes,
> 
> Which purposes?

The purposes of mainstream text editing.  Are there other comparable
applications that let users define fonts for PUA codepoints, define
their attributes, and then manipulate those characters as any other?

> > and even more surprised they expect Emacs to support
> > this.  But that's me.
> 
> PUA characters, especially MUFI, are needed to typeset some
> texts. (XeLa)TeX is still a very good typesetting system and Emacs-based
> AUCTeX is still a very good tool to use TeX.

Those are separate projects.  If they need to use non-standard
characters with corresponding non-standard fonts, they could maintain
some add-on packages for Emacs to do that.

Asking Emacs to maintain compatibility to various ad-hoc registries
outside of Unicode is not really reasonable.  How will we know which
PUA codepoints to support?  How would we know which registered
codepoints are stable enough and wide-spread enough to justify their
support in Emacs?  How will we keep track of the changes in these
areas?  This is a task for someone who is an expert in this domain, is
aware of all the important developments there, and who can update
Emacs whenever something important changes.  As things are, we have
trouble even tracking the Unicode Standard: each new edition takes
several hours to incorporate, run the tests, make the necessary
changes, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that without a dedicated volunteer who
would take care of this issue we can only wish such support will be
added, but we have no real hope it will materialize, except by some
enormous luck.

Of course, if you know someone who could be persuaded to come on board
and work on this now and in the future, I think the feature will be
welcome.

Thanks.