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

[Eli Zaretskii]

On December 31, 2020 10:14:41 AM GMT+02:00, jsbien@mimuw.edu.pl wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31 2020 at  9:49 +02, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > On December 31, 2020 8:39:03 AM GMT+02:00, jsbien@mimuw.edu.pl
> wrote:
> >> So the PUA names are to be added to ucs-names in mule-cmds.el. At
> >> first
> >> glance it doesn't seem difficult, as I already have them in the
> form
> >> of 
> >> uni-name.el. I will work on it after New Year.
> >
> > What would be the advantage of adding names for PUA codepoints?
> 
> To make it clear: I'm not adding names to PUA codepoints, I add to
> Emacs
> the names already in use for some PUA codepoints.
> 
> > The disadvantage is clear: bloating the Emacs process memory
> footprint
> > by some 137,000 strings of some non-descriptive form, like
> > PUA-CHARACTER-nn.
> 
> What do you need PUA-CHARACTER-nn for? I never proposed anything like
> this.
> 
> Moreover:
> 
> There is always price for everything.
> 
> BTW, not 137,000 but 739 for MUFI 4.0 and a little more for the
> current 
> version.

OK, it wasn't clear that you want to add MUFI codepoints.

However, if that is the intent, I think we should first discuss whether we want 
to add PUA codepoints defined by the different initiatives, and if so, which 
ones.  MUFI is not the only such collections, there are others.

We could instead wait until these codepoints are incorporated into the Unicode 
Standard (as already happened with some MUFI codepoints).  Or we might decide 
that we want to add some infrastructure which could be used by users to add 
support for ranges of PUA without adding that by default.

IOW, I think this kind of changes should be discussed first, and the place to 
discuss them is not here, it's on emacs-devel.