Re: Unicode, colours and (hiero)glyphs

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Mon Jan 30 2006 - 09:56:52 CST

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    On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Andreas Prilop wrote:

    > On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
    >
    >> 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").
    >
    > Do you mean U+2654 ... U+265F ?

    Yes.

    > IMHO, there is no different shape

    The word "shape" was probably a poor choice by me. What I meant is that as
    a visual symbol, e.g. U+2654 WHITE CHESS KING is different from U+265A
    BLACK CHESS KING, when considered as visual symbols consisting of presence
    or absence of dots or lines or pieces of curve that constitute it. Even
    a completely colorblind person can see the difference.

    > and there is no foreground or background colour involved.

    I think any visual presentation of a character postulates the presence of
    a background and a foreground coor, though not any _particular_ colors. We
    can see dots, lines, and curves only as something that has a color
    (counting black and white as colors - this is not about color as a purely
    physical phenomenon) against something of a different color.

    When you apply coloring to characters, e.g. using
    color: blue; background: yellow;
    in CSS, you effectively just set the foreground and background color
    without affecting the identity of a character in any way.

    > "White" and "Black" here could be replaced by "Player 1" and
    > "Player 2". Therefore, U+2654 and U+265A have different semantics,
    > not just different colours.

    Yes, they have different semantics, but my point was that they don't
    even have different colors. They just _look_ like being different colors.

    -- 
    Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
    


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