From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sat Dec 27 2008 - 17:15:12 CST
Michael Everson wrote:
> On 27 Dec 2008, at 12:06, Julian Bradfield wrote:
>
>> (Seriously, *can* anybody explain why on earth the mah-jong tiles
>> were encoded? I write and research on mah-jong, and I see no
>> conceivable benefit in having these codepoints.)
>
> Did you read the encoding proposal?
I guess you mean http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3147.pdf or
something similar. On a quick look, I cannot see anything convincing as
regards to the need for the tiles as characters or any samples of actual use
that way. All the examples show tiles as images between paragraphs of texts,
not inline. (There's a sample of using domino symbols inline, but they are
really different - much simpler visually, and black and white.)
The document itself uses them inline but this rather speaks against the idea
of encoding them as characters. They don't seem to fit into normal text
(normal font and normal font size, with fairly liberal interpretation of
normal).
Although I like reading about bridge and chess so that the text uses
characters for suit symbols and chess pieces, I would not want to read about
mahjong with characters for the tiles. If the tiles would be referred to in
text with symbols for them, I would very much prefer images with several
colors (something you cannot achieve using characters). Even then, the
symbols would be too small for me to read conveniently.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 02 2009 - 15:33:07 CST