Re: Game pieces proposal

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 18:59:11 CDT

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    António noted:

    > Dunno about the others, but spanish play cards suit symbols are
    > clearly "style" variations of U+2660, U+2663, U+2665 and U+2666.
    >
    > (BTW, I'm right asuming that U+2660, U+2663, U+2665 and U+2666 are the
    > "actual" suit symbols, while U+2661, U+2662, U+2664 and U+2667 are
    > just decorative dingbats?)

    Not so. The Unicode characters are the symbols for solid card
    suit symbols and "white" (i.e. outline) card suit symbols.
    How one maps those symbols onto one's specification of usage
    of symbols for the "actual" card suits is up to you.

    Most people *do* use the solid symbols. But it is not uncommon
    at all to further specify color, with clubs and spades black and
    hearts and diamonds conventionally red. This is quite often still
    done with inline gifs, as being simpler, rather than attempting
    color markup of actual characters:

    http://www.annam.co.uk/sayc.htm

    > OTOH, Michael is quite categorical in n2760: «While K[heart] (King of
    > Hearts) means the same thing as does [heart]K (Herzen König) or
    > R[heart] (Roi de C½ur), these sequences cannot be “equivalenced” to the
    > card pip [king of hearts].»
    >
    > On 2004.05.31, 15:40, Jörg Knappen <knappen@uni-mainz.de> wrote:
    >
    > > There's another point about playing cards: The letters for the
    > > "figures" are language-dependent. While english has AKQJ, german has
    > > AKDB and other languages still have other letters (all for french
    > > style cards here, german suite are still different with DKOU in
    > > german). Once one start to encode whole playing cards, one has to do
    > > it for all local letters...
    >
    > Hm, au contraire. Michael's quote above hints precisely that the goal
    > of encoding cards as separate individual characters is to overcome
    > that handicap.

    I'm not at all sure that the whole issue of "characters" for playing
    cards is sorted out yet, either in terms of the actual repertoire
    of entities to encode or their status as characters in plain text.
    Nor am I convinced that the range of expected glyphic variation of
    these "characters" is well-understood.

    --Ken



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