2012/7/3 William_J_G Overington <[email protected]>: > It is important to know that encoding is of monochrome characters.
Not really. Characters that have distinct color semantics may be encoded distinctly with their color even if they will also need to have a monochrome representative glyph that will remain informative and that will not necessarily fully show in that glyph every aspect of the character. THe representative glyph in the charts only try to make efforts to exhivit the distinctions, possibly using other eans such as by using fill patterns. "White" and "Black" in charater names however do not necessarily mean the color they represent; most often they are just indicating that one character is filled with the ink color when the other just draws the outline using an empty pattern (so in that case too, the representative glyph uses such a monochrome fill pattern). We also have the case where some scripts are using emphasizing colors as a distinctive feature of the script, by tradition, even if there is also an alternative representation using other emphasizing graphic features (such as overstrokes, underlines, or box enclosing), but here again the color (part of its name, such as "red" opposed to "black") will be the normal semantic of the character. When the character is renderable with its implicit colors in such a way that the rest of the presentationan features can preserve the distinction, these normal colors should still be used. Otherwise the alternative using alternate glyphs or fill patterns or additional conventional strokes will be used. As another example (this is just a theoretical example, not a proposal for encoding ), if we want characters to encode country flags, a flag for France and a flag for Italy would normally only preserve their distinction with their usual colors with each character unambiguously encoding ench country flag distinctly. The alternative using monochromatic glyphs would require using patterns to make the distinction between the two tricolor flags, or could use additional letters "FR" and "IT" drawn on top of a monochromatic flag with undinstinctable three vertical bands. So effectively the difficulty is to choose the distinctive representative glyph using the most common conventions when color is not preserved. But nothing should limit the ability of encoding characters with their normal distinctive semantic colors. As this represetnative glyph is not mandatory but only informative, this fallback representation in monochromatic charts is not really a problem. And charts cannot show all the necessary distinctions between lots of characters (just consider the various dots using in various scripts for example, or letters A in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic). The glyph is not enough to determine the identity, you have to look at other distinctive propoerties (including non normative properties such as transliteration schemes).
