I’m new to this, and confused about mapping, and can’t find answers to these questions. (I’ve read “How to add characters defined in the supplementary planes”, which was helpful but not sufficient.) I’m undoubtedly garbling some terminology but will try to be clear.
I’m designing a new keyboard layout for Laos. The Lao language (to oversimplify slightly) has a longer alphabet than English, so to make room for it all on the keyboard, some little-used characters - the ampersand (&), for example - will have to be assigned to higher codes in the 160-255 range, and accessed as special characters.
One Lao character, call it “bird”, is mapped to value 97, lowercase Roman “a”. The typist hits the key “a” and gets the glyph for “bird”. Question 1: Should I also map it to 3737, the unicode value for this Lao letter? When/how is that useful for anyone?
Suppose I map the ampersand at “MS Unicode BMP only” position 179, which is defined as “Superscript 3.” Now someone can get it with ALT+0179. Question 2: Should I also set the Macintosh Roman mapping to 179 (which in Mac is “greater than or equal to”)?