Re: Colours

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Oct 20 2000 - 02:38:57 EDT


At 06:12 AM 10/20/2000 -0800, Pblair@worldbank.org wrote:

>On the issue of color [sorry] as a distinctive feature of graphemes.... I
>thought there was an Ethiopic example, a punctuation character which required
>both black and red pieces, that settled this question. (I can't get at
>reference sources to look this up right now though.)

In Ethiopic manuscript convention, the paragraph separator is almost always
drawn in both red and black, but I've seen it printed in black only and
have not heard any complaints from Amharic readers. Many modern Amharic
texts don't seem to use this sign (e.g. newspapers).

The colour red is, however, very important in the manuscript tradition and,
by extension, in printing of religious texts. Red is always used for the
harmonic markings above text. However, I'm not sure that there is any need
to encode the colour value of a character (or bits of a character, in the
case of the paragraph separator), as this can be handled in layout.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks | A man was meant to be doubtful about
Vancouver, BC | himself, but undoubting about the truth;
www.tiro.com | this has been exactly reversed.
tiro@tiro.com | G.K. Chesterton



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