Sampo Syreeni recently said:
> National flags are a far cry, true. Naval signalling ones perhaps aren't.
> They stand for characters and I believe in some variations for entire
> well-known concepts. They are utilized in a way we would expect characters
> to be. I don't think the entire collection of flags used around the world
> coincides neatly enough with an already encoded script to be considered
> pure glyph variants. And colors are certainly meaningful in this context.
>
> (I can't fathom why anyone would want to encode those, though. Anything
> you can do with flags you can do with ordinary characters, only more
> efficiently. However, this could serve as an example of a script which
> relies on color as an essential feature.)
I'd agree that you wouldn't want to encode them, but you might want to make
a font where each signaling flag is in the place of its corresponding
character. That would be a use for chromatic fonts. The only other use that
springs to mind is Egyptian hieroglyphics which have a colouring scheme when
written in full colour. (Of course colour isn't *required* when reading
them, it is just an aid that helps recognition.)
As someone (Doug?) pointed out a little while back on another thread, fonts
are (mis)used to hold collections of graphics conveniently. I imagine that
if chromatic fonts were available this kind of usage would grow. It would
also allow things like illuminated capitals to be put in a font rather than
suplied as a collection of graphics files.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 16:56:34 EDT