On Wed, 26 Jun 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Sure, pictures have colour, but pictures are not characters. Not even >pictures of things that represent characters.
Depends on what you consider a character. In my inexpert opinion, any sign which can be used in a way reminiscent of a character (i.e. can be used to encode an abstract concept, is used as a part of a wider, orderly system of similar signs to encode information, and so on) *is* a character. I mean, if it walks like a duck... The fact that people didn't happen to have photographically accurate megacolor printers when they first came up with the idea of writing is a historical detail which I cannot see having anything to do with the definition of a "character", per se. >We could invent a system that uses 4 x 4 matrices of squares each in one >of 16 colours with each configuration representing a different character >from a repertoire of up to 256 characters. Should these representations >of characters be themselves encoded as characters? No, IMO. I'm not quite sure about this, either. Precisely such a scheme is currently used to encode certain high capacity 2D barcodes. IMO, what we're dealing with, here, are indeed characters. Much like the many purely technical symbols already encoded, Braille, Dingbats, bullets and certain other kinds of punctuation, arrows, control pictures, character recognition and block drawing symbols, block elements, geometric shapes, the non-Han symbols used in CJK text, musical symbols and tags. In fact, many of those seem far less like characters than discrete barcode symbols used to encode alphanumeric information -- many of the symbols already encoded are not used as part of an orderly writing system, at all, but in isolation. I think what counts is use in interchange. If there is a wide-spread need to interchange data containing a specific symbol it should be standardized and encoded in Unicode regardless of its genesis or similarity to older, more conventional characters. 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
