Re: Tags and custom vector glyph emoji (from Re: Tailoring the Marketplace (is: Re: Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final))

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2017 22:42:43 +0200

2017-04-03 20:13 GMT+02:00 William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009_at_btinternet.com
>:

>
> A tag sequence for this purpose starts with a capital letter V standing
> for vector format.
>
> At the start of the sequence a:=255; b:=0; g:=0; m:=1; p:=0; r:=0; x:=0;
> y:=0; w:=1000;
>
> At the start of the sequence the points buffer is empty, the contours
> buffer is empty and the glyphs buffer is empty.
>
> The system uses a special-purpose virtual computing engine within a
> software sandbox. The special-purpose virtual computing engine has no
> commands for loops and is a single pass interpretative system.
>
> [...]

What you are describing is reinventing the wheel, notably basically what
SVG paths already define.
But an amji is not just a path, it has also colors for fill them, stroke
styles (may be converted to fill-only paths by computing the infered
geometries), smoothing effects (color shades when they are not necessarily
uniform).

There are attempts to create a superset of SVG paths to represent it in
more compact form with additional instructions, they are used to create
"subroutines" or shared forms, affine transforms, geometric derivations
(line width, dashes, bevel or rounded join types), and color masks
(possibly with repeated patterns, and alpha transparencies). Every attempt
to extend this has become a nightmare because there were too many
objectives to follow. Finally eveyone uses SVG directly, even if this is
currently XML encoded. More successful representation use JSON instead of
XML, without breaking the extensibility.

Font encoding technologies define their own system using multiple tables
and a compact dictionnary of tables with binary encoding, not suitable for
inclusion in plain-text. Note also that Emojis could be animated when
rendered on screen (that's what we already see in many implementations
using GIF icons for their emojis, even if they are not easily resizable).
Animated SVG for now is still in beta but starts being used on some sites
and rendered by web browsers. SVG images may also be scripted and may
include accessbility feature (e.g. with sound played or hint bubbles
displayed when hovering them).

You only cover a part of what is needed but hope that someone will invest
time to implet it in a renderer: developers prefer investing time in SVG
renderers or existing font technologies for OpenType (SVG fonts will come
later when it will be capable of doing the same things as OpenType, for now
it does not cover all the existing needs).
Received on Mon Apr 03 2017 - 15:43:45 CDT

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