From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Apr 05 2011 - 08:39:33 CDT
2011/4/5 Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>:
> On 5 Apr 2011, at 02:08, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
>>> > • All the different languages' abbreviations for A, K, Q, J?
>>>
>>> No, these would be font-specific glyph variants. That's already the case, since the Queen of Spades is (quite properly) unified with the Queen of Swords.
>>> (no
>>
>> And that makes the whole notion of using characters pointless. For someone to have any assurance that what they send is what the recipient sees, s/he would need to send an image instead. Unifying Tarot cards with regular playing cards only makes sense if people know the correspondences, which they typically don't. Would the average person seeing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_of_Coins know what the corresponding regular card would be.
>
> "Regular" cards (whether European or North American) *are* historically identical with "esoteric" cards. We unified them on this basis. For my part I think the unification is satisfactory enough (and you know how I am about over-unification). However, if you think that this unification was an over-unification, then perhaps we could work together to disunify them.
Not needed to create new characters for localized abbreviations. The
set in (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F0A0.pdf)
can perfectly be supported by Unicode fonts that have per-language
customizations (e.g. in French "A, R, D, C, V" for "as, roi, dame,
cavalier, valet" instead of "A, K, Q, Kn, J" for English "Ace, King,
Queen, Knight/Princesss, Jack/Page/Prince"); effectively the 56-cards
deck that includes knights only needed for Tarot, and it's very
unfortunate that it does not include the 21 Atouts, and the Excuse.
(Note that the "abbreviation" symbol for the jokers are most often a
star within a circle, with some minor variations that do not really
depend on the language, and the abbreviation for the Excuse is a black
star, generally with 5 branches).
Then distinct fonts can be made to change the appearance of figures
and of the 4 colors, or to use the taller form of Tarot cards
(including the Knights, the 21 Atouts and the Excuse), or display the
chiromancy ("esoteric") characters used in the older Tarot de
Marseille (see them in
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_de_Marseille). In all these cases,
the full set of cards is changed to display the preference, and any
game could be played with one deck or the other, and the user could
still select himself the deck he prefers by selecting it in a list of
suitable fonts. In the Tarot de Marseille, The "Fool" is another Atout
or "Major Arcana" (number 0 or 22 depending on interpretations), which
maps to a Joker in a modern deck or to the Excuse.
Two other cards are possibly still missing to the proposed deck :
* the all white card (with a normal back side) : in some games it
may take the value of any other card, chosen by the player, and with a
higher value in fact than the joker(s) ; most commercial decks include
at least one such card, sometimes showing the rules or the summary
grid to compute points, or a commercial mark.
* and a unicolored separator card (generally blue, or red/orange or
pink) used to cut the deck after scrambling, and to mark the end of
the deck in casinos) : those cards aren't played but indicate an event
that this is the last turn before scrambling the deck again.
And there could also be a special character to designate a card
showing its reverse indistinct side (where you don't know which card
it is on the other side, except that it cannot be a separator card
which is identifiable on both sides).
Possibly a combining character or variant selector could also be used
to indicate that the card is rotated 180 degrees (some games use cards
that are not symetric, or display the abbreviation symbol only on one
corner instead of two opposite corners; the position of the card plays
a role; another position is when the card is shown horizontally,
rotated 90 degrees, to mark some bet or wait state in the game). This
180 degree rotation has a distinct meaning in "esoteric" chiromancy.
You may think that these positions are part of a higher-layer of
protocol for presentation and layout, but in playing list notations,
it may be useful (and better than showing an extra symbol after it).
One problem comes with some variants of the Tarot de Marseille, when
its 4 traditional "coloured" suits (rods/wands/batons, cups/chalices,
coins/pentagrams, swords) mapped in the modern French decks :
* (respectively: rods -> black clubs, cups/chalice -> red hearts,
coins/pentagrams -> red diamonds, swords -> black spades)
are mapped instead to the 4 alchemic elements :
* (generally: rods/black clubs -> Fire, cups/red hearts -> Water,
coins/pentagrams/red diamonds -> Earth, swords/black spades -> Air),
because there's an ambiguity depending on other traditions :
* (instead to: rods/black clubs -> Earth, cups/red hearts -> Air,
coins/pentagrams/red diamonds -> Water, swords/black spades -> Fire).
so the association of suits to alchemic elements should not be annoted
in the encoding (I've never seen in fact any playing cards deck
showing the elements directly, as this is just an interpretation of
the suits ; there are also associations of figures to theses alchemic
elements
* (notably: Jack/Page/Prince -> Earth, Knight/Cavalier/Princess ->
Air, Queen -> Water, King -> Fire)
For these reasons, it may be better to separate the encoding of suits
from the minor arcanes (numbers Ace to 10 and the 4 figures), using
combining sequences (but note that the 4 modern French suits are
already encoded separately as symbols in Unicode characters), adding
separate symbols for alchemic elements (Fire, Water, Earth, Air) and
traditional Marseille suits (rods, cups, coins/pentagrams, swords). An
laternative would be to use variant selectors, but as variants should
not create a confusion when they are not supported and the normal
glyph assign to the character without the encoded variant, I think it
would violate the rules for variant selectors.
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