Re: Pictograms

From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2000 - 04:17:48 EDT


>But the bigger problem is that the Unicode Standard is intended for
characters
>that people actually plan to implement in text engines -- and people expect
>support from the operating systems. Unicode cannot be treated as a gigantic
>catalogue of any cutesy list of thingums that people come up with without
>severely undermining its usability as the universal basis for text
>representation.

This is interesting. The question arises, however, that in the event that
some people desire at some time in the future to be able to express a
document as containing both text and some particular standardized
illustration, how should they proceed. It might be that the standardization
of the particular illustration is of interest to a fairly large user base or
that the standardization of the particular illustration is only a very minor
style of standardization amongst some specialist group. My point is that in
the future there may well come a time when people wish to include
standardized illustrations in documents that also contain text. I feel that
the situation may well be that if unicode can offer that facility, perhaps
by assigning two unicode characters as the Grand Illustration Escape
Character Open Bracket and the Grand Illustration Escape Character Close
Bracket or whatever name seems appropriate to the unicode community, then
unicode may well be used for the main document. Otherwise, I feel that
people would not say that they will therefore not seek to include
standardized illustrations in documents that otherwise contain text but
would instead say that they will include standardized illustrations in
documents that also contain text but will either not use unicode or seek to
assign some non-standardized escape code of their own, such as, say $$$< and
>$$$. This would then mean that the document looked at in a standard
unicode environment would display $$$< and >$$$ with who knows what
characters between them, whereas by the unicode community providing a simple
escape method now, a document designed to fit in with the standard could be
viewed in a standard unicode environment with the escape characters and the
characters between them either ignored or represented by a remark that an
unavailable illustration is here included, the choice being available as an
option in the software displaying the unicode text.

The list of illustrations that might be included would be all but infinite.
In an environment not connected to the internet one can envisage that the
suggestion for Grand Illustration Escape Character Open Bracket and Grand
Illustration Escape Character Close Bracket would lead to the prospect of
each office having dozens of CDs on the shelf with someone loading and
unloading many CDs as the software displaying the document tries to satisfy
all the pictures embedded in it.

Yet in an internet based environment, and the internet is here to stay,
software displaying such a document could access the internet and obtain the
illustrations. An interesting point arises, namely that of provenance and
availability of such illustrations. When one is writing a scientific paper
and one states a reference to a paper published perhaps years ago, a reader
who wishes to look up that paper can go to an appropriate library and read a
copy of what was written at the time. That is, even if the author or
authors made a mistake at the time, or had later ideas, that paper is as it
was at the time that it was published. It would be ridiculous if the
referenced paper had been changed in the meantime and now included later
ideas. Different content needs to be in a new paper. I feel that it would
be a useful facility for there to be an electronic library of deposit where
anyone may place an illustration and that illustration would thereafter be
available in its original unaltered form for ever. A similar system to the
International Standard Book Number system could be used, except with more
digits. In the International Standard Book Number system, as I seem to
remember that it works, there is the same total number of digits for any
book: large publishers have a small number of digits to mean their business
or imprint and then a large number of digits for them to assign to their
books as they choose: small publishers have a large number of digits to mean
their business or imprint and then a small number of digits for them to
assign to their books as they choose. I am unsure what happens to an
International Standard Book Number when a second, altered or corrected,
edition of a book is published, whether a new ISBN is assigned to the new
edition or whether the old ISBN is recycled or whether some publishers have
the one system and some publishers the other system yet for standardized
illustrations I feel that the rule should be that once an illustration is
uploaded to the electronic library of deposit then it is unchangeable under
that illustration code for all time, though a comment facility to add a
later note that it had now been replaced by a later illustration or
withdrawn due to error could be provided. This would then provide
provenance to anyone including a standardized illustration in a document
that the illustration obtained would always be the same.

I wonder if people might like to discuss the possibility that the place to
search for standardized illustrations should be a web site operated by the
unicode organization.

For example, suppose that there were an illustration of the first two cycles
of a sine wave, with labeled axes, perhaps four inches wide by three inches
high and that that had a standard illustration number and that there were a
similar illustration for a cosine wave and so on. Someone producing such
illustrations could upload them to the electronic library of deposit and
assign a standard illustration number to them. Each would then be useable
in documents simply by including the standard illustration number between
the Grand Illustration Escape Character Open Bracket and the Grand
Illustration Escape Character Close Bracket.

Certainly, there would be all manner of illustrations provided, from small
inline special symbols to line diagrams to photographs and it may well be
that a system somewhat more complex than simply using a 20 digit or so
number between a Grand Illustration Escape Character Open Bracket and a
Grand Illustration Escape Character Close Bracket would be needed, such as
specifying a size as well, or whatever is agreed to be needed for a
standard.

William Overington

14 June 2000



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