Re: Proposal to encode dominoes and other game symbols

From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 09:59:04 CDT

  • Next message: Ernest Cline: "RE: Proposal to encode dominoes and other game symbols"

    > [Original Message]
    > From: Simon Montagu <smontagu@smontagu.org>
    >
    > Ernest Cline wrote:
    > > Dominoes:
    > >
    > > I'm not certain that a full 724 set of Dominoes is needed.
    > > In plain text, the orientation of a domino would seem to
    > > be a matter for the font to specify. The orientation
    > > becomes a concern only when the dominoes are laid
    > > out as played, and that cannot be represented in plain text.
    > > If instead of providing all four orientations, no preferred
    > > orientation or only a single orientation were specified,
    > > then instead of 724 characters only 191 characters
    > > would be required to represent the same variety of
    > > dominoes as the proposal calls for.
    >
    > The examples in the proposal show that there can be a
    > semantic distinction between the two horizontal orientations
    > of the same bone. This suggests that if the orientations are
    > encoding separately they should have the Bidi Mirroring
    > property. Your suggestion of encoding the pips instead of
    > the bones would eliminate that problem, of course.

    I fail to see an example in the proposal (other than a layout
    of the dominoes as played, which I do not consider to be
    a plain text use) where there is a semantic distinction between
    orientations. There are examples in Figures 4 and 5 where
    an orientation has been chosen for stylistic reasons. However,
    those stylistic reasons can be accommodated without having
    to encode all four orientations of each bone, by picking a
    standard orientation for the unstyled bone.



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