From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jan 27 2006 - 06:00:46 CST
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
> On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Dieter.Glade@db-telematik.de wrote:
>
>> UNICODE might get a problem with colored/colorized glyphs (as may be the
>> case with egyptian hieroglyphs), WHERE THE - DIFFERENT - COLOURS USED BY
>> EGYPTIAN SCRIBES (not just black&white) might bear different meanings
>
> I'm not familiar with such differences, but I'm not fluent in hieroglyphs
> in general. But it is surely conceivable that colors express essential
> differences. After all, people might e.g. use a particular symbol in green
> to indicate "yes" and in red to indicate "no". It would normally be unwise
> to rely on such an expression, but such things happen.
>
> This, however, is external to Unicode. I don't think Unicode should, or
> will, cover the use of colors in characters (apart from the existence of
> "white" and "black" versions of some symbols, like chess pieces, which are
> differences in shape rather than color - "black" and "white" really stand
> for "foreground color" and "background color"). Coloring an entire glyph,
> e.g. making "black heart suit" red, is to be handled at other protocol
> levels, such as markup or formatting commands. Using different colors
> inside a glyph simply does not fit into the underlying model; if a symbol
> has internal color variation as an essential ingredient, then it simply
> won't be treated as a _character_ but as an image.
I completely disagree here. Unicode can perfectly encode the abstract character with a name that clearly indicates its intended semantic and identity, even if this means that the *informative* representative glyph cannot reflect this color. However such usual color distinction could be rendered differently using a glyph variant, including but not limited to, effects like shadowing, outlining, overbars, negative. Not encoding the color distinction would make the encoding defective, with loss of important information.
A color-capable renderer would of course use color,but a B&W renderer would usesuch glyph variation.
Of course I don't mean encoding modifiers for colorthatcouldbeappliedonany character.
But I think that encoding characters similar to RED SUN and YELLOW SUN would be possible, and that even for this case it's possible to create informative B&W representative glyphs, for use in charts, but explained inthe same chapter of the standard.
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