Sampo Syreeni recently said: > National flags are a far cry, true. Naval signalling ones perhaps aren't. > They stand for characters and I believe in some variations for entire > well-known concepts. They are utilized in a way we would expect characters > to be. I don't think the entire collection of flags used around the world > coincides neatly enough with an already encoded script to be considered > pure glyph variants. And colors are certainly meaningful in this context. > > (I can't fathom why anyone would want to encode those, though. Anything > you can do with flags you can do with ordinary characters, only more > efficiently. However, this could serve as an example of a script which > relies on color as an essential feature.)
I'd agree that you wouldn't want to encode them, but you might want to make a font where each signaling flag is in the place of its corresponding character. That would be a use for chromatic fonts. The only other use that springs to mind is Egyptian hieroglyphics which have a colouring scheme when written in full colour. (Of course colour isn't *required* when reading them, it is just an aid that helps recognition.) As someone (Doug?) pointed out a little while back on another thread, fonts are (mis)used to hold collections of graphics conveniently. I imagine that if chromatic fonts were available this kind of usage would grow. It would also allow things like illuminated capitals to be put in a font rather than suplied as a collection of graphics files. Tim -- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer