Re: Coloured Punctuation and Annotation

On Thu, 6 Apr 2017 13:17:36 -0700
Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> While it appears possible, after Khaled's demonstration, I still
> think that the use of "white ink" instead of the "white" parts of a
> character being treated "transparent" is far from standard text
> presentation. (And I've yet to see an example that's motivated by
> anything other than emoji).

I think multicoloured fonts for plain text are in their infancy.
However, we now need to be on guard against the natural conflation of
'white' and 'transparent'. UTS#51 has a good paragraph on the topic in
the 'Design Guidelines' section:

"Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE
are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be
presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black”
and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus
outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill.
Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT
POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white”
and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate
skin color."

I think it would be worth making those points in the Unicode Standard -
I suggest the section on 'Geometric Shapes', which is Section 22.8 in
TUS 9.0.0.

Of course, if U+25A1 WHITE SQUARE is the outline of a square, it then
seems odd that a valid presentation form should be just a spacing
glyph, as seems to be preferred for chess boards! I suppose this could
be considered an edge case :-)

Richard.
Received on Fri Apr 07 2017 - 05:01:55 CDT