Re: Unicode, colours and (hiero)glyphs

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Fri Jan 27 2006 - 02:14:39 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: Unicode, colours and (hiero)glyphs"

    On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Dieter.Glade@db-telematik.de wrote:

    > UNICODE might get a problem with colored/colorized glyphs (as may be the
    > case with egyptian hieroglyphs), WHERE THE - DIFFERENT - COLOURS USED BY
    > EGYPTIAN SCRIBES (not just black&white) might bear different meanings

    I'm not familiar with such differences, but I'm not fluent in hieroglyphs
    in general. But it is surely conceivable that colors express essential
    differences. After all, people might e.g. use a particular symbol in green
    to indicate "yes" and in red to indicate "no". It would normally be unwise
    to rely on such an expression, but such things happen.

    This, however, is external to Unicode. I don't think Unicode should, or
    will, cover the use of colors in characters (apart from the existence of
    "white" and "black" versions of some symbols, like chess pieces, which are
    differences in shape rather than color - "black" and "white" really stand
    for "foreground color" and "background color"). Coloring an entire glyph,
    e.g. making "black heart suit" red, is to be handled at other protocol
    levels, such as markup or formatting commands. Using different colors
    inside a glyph simply does not fit into the underlying model; if a symbol
    has internal color variation as an essential ingredient, then it simply
    won't be treated as a _character_ but as an image.

    -- 
    Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
    


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