On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, John Cowan wrote: >I looked at the image (less than ideal) at >http://www.fortknoxxjewelry.com/store/myname/images/1177_l.jpg and fed >it through the Gimp to strip out color information (specifically, >Image/Colors/Desaturate followed by Image/Colors/Threshold, taking the >127 default, which leaves stark black and white).
The point was, there are a lot more. You can start with http://members.shaw.ca/quadibloc/other/flaint.htm . And that is only for the international flags. There are lots of national and proprietary ones, too, if I'm not entirely mistaken. Unify the whole set and you'll end up with a number of distinct symbols with no difference besides color. >In any event, this is plainly a letter-by-letter cipher for the basic >Latin alphabet (A-Z), and the fact that single letters or combinations >may be used as codes for cross-linguistic concepts is of no more >interest to a character encoding standard than that "ABALC" can mean >"Abandon all claims" in any of various natural languages. To a degree, yes. But the line is hardly clear-cut. By the same token, we might as well deprecate many of the alphabets in Unicode as they can be considered a cipher of IPA. The point is, a widely used cipher does constitute a new alphabet. (We might get back into the Klingon debate, here. I'd rather refrain.) Again, I'm not saying signalling flags should be coded. Neither am I disputing the fact that such signalling systems are subordinate to conventional alphabets. I'm not even saying a single set of such flags couldn't be validly coded in monochrome. (Any single set of signalling flags is usually designed to be read in adverse lighting conditions where color is poorly perceived. It is not an accident you found little trouble distinguishing the flags in monochrome.) What I'm suggesting, instead, is that in certain contexts where printing/wrinting technology hasn't presented an obstacle, meaning can indeed have been assigned to colors in what is basically running text. This makes me think that the monochromatic nature of characters is more a technological necessity than an inherent part of the definition of a character. If this is the case, it wouldn't be a bad idea to prepare for the inclusion of colored glyphs in Unicode, should the need arise, and to be careful not to dismiss coloring as a potential primary feature of new character when considering coding proposals in the future. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
