RE: Chromatic font research

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Tue Jun 25 2002 - 15:14:15 EDT


On 06/25/2002 11:17:52 AM Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>Use of the Private Use Area is never questionable, as far as it remains
>*private*.

I think this might be overreacting -- or at least it can seem to be so. In
principle, there's nothing wrong with William creating a character to
experiment with, nothing wrong with assigning a PUA codepoint for that
character, and nothing wrong with publicly documenting that.

William, I think some people on this list are just a little exhausted on
Overingtonian discussions of the PUA. I may be wrong, but I suspect that
that's really what Marco is reacting to. You might want to limit comments
in that regard a bit. You said,

>Also, as a contribution to the research discussion, I wonder if I may
>suggest the following test item.
>
>U+E7C2 HOLLY LEAF (GREEN) SURROUNDED BY FIVE BERRIES (RED)

Your definition of the character for your purposes is valid in and of
itself, but it's not centrally important to the discussion (Marco has
identified other candidates that can be used for experimentation), and is
probably a tender spot with some people. In particular, the wording
suggests you're offering this character to the rest of the list, which is
reminiscent of ideas of standardised PUA allocations, to which most are
very opposed. Thus, others might appreciate it if a comment in this vein
were limited to something like, "For my experimentation, I'm defining a PUA
character HOLLY LEAF (GREEN) SURROUNDED BY FIVE BERRIES (RED), which I'll
document on my web site in case it's of interest to anyone else.'

BTW, while I think your character is perfectly fine for you to experiment
with (and has a fun aspect to it), I am quite concerned at your choice of
name: it suggests that it might be reasonable for someone to encode
characters with specific chromatic attributes. I definitely think this
would be inappropriate for a character set encoding standard.

>> [... I am hopeful that chromatic font technology
>> has now reached a gel level [...]
>
>As far as I know, chromatic font technology does *not* exist yet and there
>is no big need for it.

I had the same thoughts.

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



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