On 02.12.2011 21:48, Ross Moore wrote:
Hi Tobias,


On 03/12/2011, at 6:06, Tobias Schoel<liesdieda...@googlemail.com>  wrote:

As a teacher I can think of some more Applications. Of course, these are 
pedagogical:

Teaching scripts to beginners (learning to write a primary school, learning to 
write in a different script when learning another language (or even in the same 
language: Mongol?):

You might want to color single parts of a glyph in order to highlight them. So, for 
example in a handwritten (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift or 
english equivalents I haven't found in the time) "a" the beginning or 
end-strokes might be colored.

Yes, but are these examples really requiring parts of the same whole character 
coloured differently?

Presuming that the font did allow access to individual glyphs, as if separate 
characters, then would not all meaningful aspects be equally well (if not 
better) encoded by an overlay?
The result would be mostly the same. I don't know if some software might treat a partially colored glyph and two overlaid glyphs distuinguishably differently.

Are overlaids encoded in a font and if yes, how are they accessible via XeTeX?
That is, position a coloured version of the required glyph over the full 
character in monochrome.

In the pedagogical setting, you are presumably talking about the single stroke 
as a sub-part of the whole character, so it deserves to be placed as an entity 
in itself.
As a single stroke wouldn't be recognised as such, it should be shown in conjunction with the whole character. For example print the whole character in gray and the interesting stroke in brigt red.
This is quite different to a colored diacritical mark modifying the meaning of 
a character.
Do you mean a technical difference or a semantic difference? Of course, the semantics differ. That's also the case with mathematical diacritics vs. text diacritics. The technical aspects should serve these semantics.


Of course the font creator has to create sub-glyphs or other fancy stufff, but 
XeTeX should allow (re)composition of the glyph with different colors.

bye

Toscho

Hope this helps,

        Ross


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