Private Use Group (was Re: Chromatic font research)

From: Mark Davis (mark@macchiato.com)
Date: Fri Jun 28 2002 - 10:11:19 EDT


Fascinated as I am by the many imaginative proposals for private use
characters--I can hardly contain myself at the prospect of encoding
rotating 3D Mr. Potato head components, in full color and with sound
effects--I would suggest that the people most excited about this topic
form their own mailing list (it is very easy to do on
http://groups.yahoo.com/). Someone could then prepare a nice monthly
summary of the progress so that the remaining few people on this list
would not feel abandoned.

Mark
__________
http://www.macchiato.com
◄ “Eppur si muove” ►

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
To: "'William Overington'" <WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk>;
<unicode@unicode.org>; "Daniel Yacob" <unicode@geez.org>
Cc: <archive@ngo.globalnet.co.uk>
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 05:37
Subject: RE: Chromatic font research

> William Overington wrote:
> > The occurrence of red words raises an interesting aspect of
> > this discussion in that a chromatic font would be needed
> > for the full stop character when decorated [...]
>
> A chromatic font in *conjunction* with markup, of course.
>
> You are talking abut *decorative* color, and there is no need to
have any
> decorative elements in *plain* text, if I understand the meaning of
the
> English adjective "plain".
>
> A decorated full stop should only appear within a piece of text
marked up in
> some special way, e.g.:
>
> <chromatic main="black" decoration="red">
> This is my colorful text.
> </chromatic>
>
> Therefore, color decoration is an issue only for *fonts* and/or
*rich* text
> systems, not for Unicode or *plain* text encoding.
>
> --- * --- * ---
>
> The above statement would suddenly become false upon the discovery
of a
> *writing* system where color is a *structural* element, that must be
> reproduced also in plain text.
>
> But such a writing system is so far just a theoretical *hypothesis*!
>
> I have brought evidence that color seems a structural element of the
 Aztec
> codices, but I have *not* proven that Aztec codices constitute a
*writing*
> system.
>
> On the contrary, I can report that most scholars deny this. Florian
Coulmas
> (in his "Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems") says that Aztec
is a
> "borderline case" between writing proper and pictographic systems.
>
> So, as Ken Whistler said, at the present stage it does not seem that
Aztec
> glyphs are valid candidates for encoding and, hence, the issue is
just
> fireplace chatting.
>
> _ Marco
>
>



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