There's no advantage because what you want to create is effectively another markup language with its own syntax (but requiring new obscure characters that most applications and users will not be able to interpret and render correctly in the way intended by you, and with still many things you have forgotten about the specific needs for images (e.g. colorimetry profiles, aspect ratio of pixels with bitmaps, undesired effects that must be controled such as "moiré" artefacts).
You don't need new characters to create a markup language and its syntax. Today the world goes very well with HTML(5) which is now the bext markup language for document (including for inserting embedded images that don't require any external request, or embedding special effects on images, such as animation or dynamic layouts for adapting the document to the redering device, with the help of CSS and Javascript that are also embeddable). At least with HTML5 they don't try to reinvent the image formats and there's ample space for supporting multiple images formats tuned for specific needs (e.g. JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, TIFF...) including animation and video, and synchronization of images and audio in time for videos, or with user interactions. They are designed separately and benefit from patient researches made since long (your desired format, still undocumented, is largely under the level needed for images, independantly of the markup syntax you want to create to support them, and independantly of the fact that you also want to encode these syntaxic elements with new characters, something that is absolutely not needed for any markup language) In summary, you are reinventing the wheel. 2015-05-28 13:50 GMT+02:00 William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10...@btinternet.com >: > Responding to Mark E. Shoulson: > > The big advantage of this new format is that the result is an unambiguous > Unicode plain text file and could be placed within a file of plain text > without having to make the whole document a markup file to some format. > Plain text is the key advantage. > > The following may be useful as a guide to the original problem that I am > trying to solve. > > http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-2.html#Longer_Term > > I tried to apply the brilliant new "base character followed by tag > characters" format to the problem. > > In the future, maybe Serif DrawPlus will have the ability to export a > picture to this new format. > > William Overington > > 28 May 2015 > > >