Re: Proposal to encode dominoes and other game symbols

From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 13:00:41 CDT

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    Michael Everson scripsit:

    > Trump seems to mean something else in English these days.

    Not really. In the game of tarot/tarocchi, which is a species of whist,
    there are a fixed set of trumps; in successor games using the standard deck,
    which suit is trumps is determined by one of a variety of procedures.
    "Major arcana" for pre-20th-century decks is anachronistic.

    Your complaint that modern decks don't appear as fonts is a direct consequence
    of the copyright laws, since such fonts clearly infringe the copyrights on
    the decks. We're lucky to have the two Marseilles Tarot fonts at all, but
    the fact is that we do have them.

    > >On dominoes: I agree that there is no plain-text distinction between domino
    > >orientations,
    >
    > Figure 1 shows a distinction being made.

    As a dominoes player, I deny it. What this says is that the 0-3, 1-4, 2-5,
    3-6, 3-3 (or double 3) and 6-6 (or double 6) bones are valuable. It would
    say exactly the same thing if the 3-3 and 6-6 had horizontal orientation.

    In Figure 4, the vertical domino representing the chapter number is a
    dingbat. In the text, it is clear that there is no difference other
    than layout between the vertical dominoes in the hand and the horizontal
    dominoes in the running text.

    In the books on dominoes I have, the usage is either 3-4 (for which 4-3
    is a synonym) or three-four (for which four-three is a synonym, and in
    which double six is used rather than six-six).

    > >It would even be possible to code each half-domino only once.
    >
    > Oh, come on. That is a kludge. Keep it simple.

    Very well.

    I'd like to see evidence that domino glyphs above 12-12 are used in text,
    though, as opposed to pictures of dominoes. I've never seen them.

    > CSS glyph rotation? I am astonished. We have not done that with the
    > multitude of arrows we have encoded. Why would you want to make this
    > into a script with complex rendering, John?

    Left-pointing arrows and right-pointing arrows have different semantics,
    but the 3-4 glyph and the 4-3 glyph refer to the same bone.

    -- 
    De plichten van een docent zijn divers,         John Cowan
    die van het gehoor ook.                         jcowan@reutershealth.com
          --Edsger Dijkstra                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    


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