The following table gives a list of Unicode private-use character assignments used within SIL International.
This information is provided for those who work in collaboration with SIL and who may wish to interchange language data. It does not constitute a recommendation for widespread adoption of PUA character assignments.
SIL corporation-wide PUA usage uses the codepoint range U+F100..U+F8FF. Individual SIL field entities might also make independent PUA character assignments in the range U+E000..U+EFFF. Corporate PUA assignments follow the following roadmap:
| Codepoint range | Purpose |
|---|---|
| F000..F0FF | (reserved) |
| F100..F13F | specials |
| F140..F15F | (reserved) |
| F160..F17F | combining marks |
| F180..F1EF | modifier letters (e.g. superscripts) |
| F1F0..F1FF | (reserved) |
| F200..F2FF | Latin |
| F300..F31F | Hebrew |
| F320..F33F | Cyrillic |
| F340..F34F | (reserved) |
| F350..F6FF | other non-Latin alphabetic characters |
| F700..F8FF | (reserved) |
In preparing fonts to facilitate corporate transition to Unicode, WSTech has attempted to create a font that will meet the character needs of users working with Latin or Cyrillic scripts throughout the corporation. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to identify private-use character needs related to these scripts from all entities. Documented here are the code-points for each of the Private Use Area (PUA) characters which have been assigned to the corporate area of the PUA. The Unicode 15.0 standard includes 225 characters that were previously allocated to codepoints in the Private Use Area by SIL’s PUA committee.
- A TECkit mapping file for converting from PUA codepoints to Unicode codepoints is provided here.
- SIL Converters is an ideal tool to use with the TECKit mapping file to convert files from the PUA codepoint to the official Unicode codepoints.
Character properties are listed in the UCD-SIL_PUA_-date-.xls file which is included in the zip archive below. We have also included a worksheet (DeprecatedAssignments) to SIL's PUA UCD (Unicode Character Database) spreadsheet. This worksheet shows the history of every SIL PUA character: what PUA version it was added and what version, if any, it was deprecated. This will help implementers determine which PUA versions a specific keyboard, font, or mapping table supports.
Also included is a pdf file (and the Word document) describing the PUA characters and some of the history of why they were added to the SIL PUA registry.
- Download SILCorpPUAAssign
The SIL field entities range was used for the Abyssinica SIL Ethiopic font. Documentation for that range of characters is found in the ethiopia section of this repo.