Re: Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

Andrew West wrote as follows:

> … (note that the colored characters do not change the color of the
> emoji they are attached to [before or after, depending upon whether
> you are speaking French or English dialect of emoji], they are just
> intended as a visual indication of what colour you wish the emoji
> was).

I thought that the idea was that they could possibly be used for glyph
substitution with an appropriate font, so that there could be, for
example, a glyph of a polar bear.

I produced a proposal for some characters specifically intended each as
a colour modifier character.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18198-colour-mod-chars.pdf

I know that the document was once on the agenda for a UTC meeting but
was not mentioned in the minutes, so I do not know whether consideration
of the best plain text way to express a request for a particular colour
for an emoji is still taking place and my document is just one of
several possibilities being considered.

William Overington
Thursday 24 January 2019

------ Original Message ------
From: "Andrew West via Unicode" <unicode_at_unicode.org>
To: "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark_at_kli.org>
Cc: "Unicode Discussion" <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Sent: Thursday, 2019 Jan 24 At 11:50
Subject: Re: Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 02:10, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode
<unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:
>
> Unicode isn't here to encode cool new ideas that would be cool and
> new. It's here for writing what people already do.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18141r2-emoji-colors.pdf

"Add 14 colored emoji characters for decorative and/or descriptive
uses. These may be used to indicate that an emoji has a different
color."

No evidence has been provided that anybody is currently using colored
blobs for this purpose (in fact emoji users have explicitly rejected
this method for indicating emoji color:
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18208-white-wine-rgi.pdf), just an
assertion that it would be a good idea if emoji users could add a
colored swatch to an existing emoji to indicate what color they want
it to represent (note that the colored characters do not change the
color of the emoji they are attached to [before or after, depending
upon whether you are speaking French or English dialect of emoji],
they are just intended as a visual indication of what colour you wish
the emoji was).

This proposal to add 14 additional colored circles, squares and hearts
is a perfect example of a cool new idea for something that the authors
think would be really useful, but for which there is no evidence of
existing use. The UTC should have rejected it as out of scope, but we
all know that rules and procedures do not apply to the Emoji
Subcommittee, so in fact this cool new idea will be included in
Unicode 12 in March.

Andrew
Received on Thu Jan 24 2019 - 09:50:42 CST