Marco Cimarosti wrote as follows. >William Overington wrote: >> The occurrence of red words raises an interesting aspect of >> this discussion in that a chromatic font would be needed >> for the full stop character when decorated [...] > >A chromatic font in *conjunction* with markup, of course.
Well, actually, I was thinking of a chromatic font in use with a plain text file, but chromatic fonts could be used with either plain text or markup as desired. >You are talking abut *decorative* color, and there is no need to have any >decorative elements in *plain* text, if I understand the meaning of the >English adjective "plain". Well, yes, plain can mean undecorated in English, yet I was using the word plain in the sense of a file containing just Unicode characters having the meanings in the Unicode code charts, as contrasted with a file that contains markup or fancy text of some manufacturer's proprietary file format where some of the codes are assigned meanings specific to that markup or fancy text system which meanings are not included in the Unicode code charts. So, in the sense in which I used the word plain in the phrase plain text I was intending to convey the notion of a sequence of code points where the only meanings are those in the Unicode specification, so, for the Ethiopic full stop it would be in a plain text file and would also be decorated. >A decorated full stop should only appear within a piece of text marked up in >some special way, e.g.: > > <chromatic main="black" decoration="red"> > This is my colorful text. > </chromatic> > >Therefore, color decoration is an issue only for *fonts* and/or *rich* text >systems, not for Unicode or *plain* text encoding. Well, why? Surely a decorated full stop could be in a plain text file being displayed in a program which has a background colour of white, a foreground colour of black and a decoration colour of red set as the colours in which the program works. Certainly for the Ethiopic text the colours are always white, black and red and the matter may be more complicated for lettering and symbols of a general nature. Yet I feel that a presumtion that markup is obligatory is not necessary. The colours need to be decided in some way. Those ways could be markup; or setting of colours by the end user pushing buttons to alter the default colours of the program displaying the file; or by the font offering guidance as to the colours to use; or some interacting combination of those methods. It seems to me that various people have contributed various good ideas as to how chromatic fonts could be produced and applied and the way that they could also contain items such as text to help a speech synthesiser and software subroutines which could be obeyed. I wonder if the topic could now move forward with a view to defining a format for these and any other features so that hopefully an advanced font format which can encompass them all can arise. What is the correct, polite way to proceed please? Is there a committee that would need to be approached or what? Does anyone know please? William Overington 29 June 2002
