In these tests, I was interested in the entire BMP PUA range, but particularly in these portions of that range:

Of course, Word is important to consider becuase it is in widespread use. Therefore, whatever behaviours we encounter in WordPad are likely to occur also in other applications built from the same version of the Rich Edit control. WordPad is important to consider because it is based on the RichEdit control. Notepad is of interest because it does little on its own to affect rendering, and so gives an indication of what Windows GDI is doing when PUA characters are displayed. I performed tests on Windows XP using Notepad, WordPad and Word 2002. 2 For this reason, I decided I should do some tests to see how these PUA code points are handled in Microsoft Products. Many of our users have PUA character needs, and Microsoft has made use of portions of the BMP PUA range. Within SIL International, many of our users are working with Microsoft products, Windows and Word in particular. It does raise concern for users of those software products, however, and point to the need for testing.

That does not mean that none of these code points are usable in popular software products, though: the fact that vendors have made use of these code points does not necessarily imply that software products made by these vendors will assume certain semantics. At worst, though, irreparable data loss might also occur.īetween them, major software vendors have made use of the entire PUA area in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of Unicode (U+E000.U+F8FF) for one purpose or another. If a software product assumes different semantics for a code point than the user is assuming, the user may experience unexpected text-processing behaviours, such as lines breaking at undesirable points within the text. For people with PUA 1 character needs, a major concern is whether the software products that they use will make particular assumptions about the semantics of PUA characters that affect how their text is processed.

Irish fonts in microsoft word