Re: Coloured diacritics

[John Hudson]

At 05:39 PM 12/7/2003, Christopher John Fynn wrote:

"John Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> The way to do this is to decompose bases and marks at the glyph level if
> they are not already decomposed at the character level, and then to apply a
> colour to the mark. In order to do this you need to know what is a mark
> glyph and what is abase glyph (this doesn't necessarily correspond to what
> is a mark character and a base character, so areguably this is not a
> Unicode question).
But you can't depend on being able to do this with all fonts. ...
Or any fonts. I was trying to draw attention to the complexity of colouring 
*characters*, by pointing out that colour is an aspect of display, i.e. of 
glyph space. As you say, the lookups required to support colouring of 
component glyphs would be very complex for some scripts: whatever the 
script, you need to decompose absolutely everything that you want to be 
able to distinctively colour. I would add that not only is this difficult, 
it is also a very inefficient and will greatly reduce processing speeds.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks          www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC           [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What was venerated as style  was nothing more than
an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
               - Orhan Pamuk, _My name is red_