At 23:30 -0400 2004-05-24, Ernest Cline wrote:
Dominoes:
I'm not certain that a full 724 set of Dominoes is needed. In plain text, the orientation of a domino would seem to be a matter for the font to specify.
Hardly. Complex display behaviour is expected for writing systems like Gujarati or Mongolian. It is not expected by users of Miscellaneous symbols.
The orientation becomes a concern only when the dominoes are laid out as played, and that cannot be represented in plain text.
That's not true. In the first place, the tiles if properly designed can be used in the same way as ASCII art is to make a layout (just as they were in lead type). In the second, orientation is also a concern when the tiles are used in text, as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 4.
If instead of providing all four orientations, no preferred orientation or only a single orientation were specified, then instead of 724 characters only 191 characters would be required to represent the same variety of dominoes as the proposal calls for.
We have discussed "glyph rotation" for more complex scripts like Egyptian and SignWriting, and it is generally agreed that we have no mechanism for causing such behaviour.
It might be better to consider encoding the pips for 0 to 18. (either in addition to or instead of the bones themselves). Some domino sets (as shown in the proposal) use different colors for different pip values. With the pips available as Unicode characters, it would be trivial to use HTML and CSS
to not only create the desired dominoes out of the pips, but place them in any desired orientation and in relation to other dominoes for play.
I considered a smaller set. But I don't think it makes sense in any way that is user-friendly or practical in terms of the ways in which the characters are used. Orientation of domino tiles is significant; there is ample space in the standard for 724 tiles. Let's not make something simple into something impossible for a false economy of code positions. This isn't an 8-bit world any more!
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
