Re: UniCharacter (Re: Codes for codes for codes for... (RE: Chromatic font research))

From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 13:12:29 EDT


Tex wrote:

> Lends a whole new meaning to unification! The single character encoding,
> UniCharacter!. Just color what you need.

Yeah! I like Tex's suggestion. It would eliminate all kinds of problems.
We wouldn't have to worry about encoding anything ever again, because users
would have all the tools they need to express whatever they wanted just by
coloring in the bits! And nobody would have any problems decoding it!

The only question that remains is, "how much resolution is enough"? I
think if we have 512x512 bytes for 256x256 resolution at 16-bits/pixel for
color, that ought to be enough resolution to satisfy anyone. So each
character would only require 2,097,152 bits. With all the fancy compression
schemes we could cook up, that shouldn't pose any difficulty at all. And
it really ought to appeal to the RAM manufacturers...

Speaking of compression schemes, we could pick a space of say 32 bits and
allow people to register the characters they like by NUMBER (!), and we
could keep a whole technical committee engrossed for decades in deciding
which proposed pictures were really the same and thus have "already been
registered", and numbering things, then we could transmit information
compactly by using the catalog numbers instead of the pictures. That might
be helpful to users, I'm not sure...

        Rick



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