Marco,
I see your point, you are probably right.
Peter,
I agree with you that color or other attributes are not Unicode issues
when each entity has a different meaning. Each just gets their own
codepoint. I was just trying to draw out something useful from a rather
useless long thread that wasted a lot of time.
What I am trying to understand is where exactly the color (or smell,
sound) information gets added to the code. Does the font developer add
this information to the glyphs and the rendering engine processes the
information correctly? The two glyphs look the same otherwise, so how
would the rendering engine know what to do without the attribute info?
Does a mechanism for attribute already exist when a glyph gets sent
from the font to the rendering engine?
I know that this Aztec writing system will probably never be encoded,
but I like to think in advance about possible solutions when a related
issue might pop up some day, even if I push into the back of my brain
then. Looking at the amount of time wasted already, a few thoughts
about the only usable issue in the thread shouldn't be a waste of time.
So, if it is a font issue, how would these attributes be stored with
the font? Or does it look up the descriptive attributes assigned to
each Unicode character? Meaning now that the attribute is defined in
the Unicode standard as part of the character description, thus a
Unicode issue after all? Hmm - full circle - chicken or egg?
Dave
--- Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
>
> On 07/05/2002 03:00:35 PM Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> >David Possin wrote:
> >> But, if something it silently ignored, then somebody has
> discovered
> >> something that nobody wants to touch. I have observed this sevaral
> >> times now, the latest incident was in the Chromatic Font Research
> >> thread, with 2 cases:
> >>
> >> Aztec glyphs: [...] Silence.
> >
> >Funny. I interpreted that silence the opposite way: very positively.
> I
> >didn't expect any immediate action, and the absence of denials made
> me
> feel
> >the information I passed was not totally pointless.
> >
> >Anyway, even if the silence actually meant "Who cares?", it doesn't
> bother
> >me, because I think this is NOT an issue for Unicode...
>
> I think Marco has got this right. Let's suppose Aztec writing gets
> deciphered and there are cases of the same shape with different
> colouring
> to mean different things. Let's further suppose that we determine
> that the
> difference in semantics isn't akin to the ways in which colouring of
> English text might conceivably be used (e.g. for emphasis) but is
> really
> fundamental. Let's also further suppose that, taking all things into
> consideration, we really do consider this text and come to the
> conclusion
> that the best solution is one that's purely text-based (i.e. no
> markup or
> other higher-level protocal). We're nowhere near having made all
> these
> conclusions, but let's just suppose. So, we identify two things that
> are
> minimally contrastive: a red-and-white-whatsit, and a
> blue-green-and-yellow-whatsit. They are two entities and each gets a
> codepoint. That's an encoding issue. How they get rendered isn't an
> encoding issue.
>
> Of course, at that point, we'd be wanting to consider how to deal
> with
> chromatic issues in text rendering where chromaticity is inherent to
> the
> character and not a matter of user-discretion (for which formatting
> is
> appropriate). But we are not yet at the point of knowing that is even
> necessary. And since it would clearly not be a trivial problem to
> solve
> (it's not finding a way to do it that's hard -- it's the huge amount
> of
> secondary implications), I think the silence amounts to a reaction
> that we
> neither are ready to cross that bridge nor do we need to at this time
> -- in
> fact, it's not yet certain that we will ever need to -- and that in
> the
> mean time there are more immediate and real concerns to be dealt
> with.
>
>
>
> - 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>
>
>
>
>
=====
Dave Possin
Globalization Consultant
www.Welocalize.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales/
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