On 4/5/2017 1:10 AM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 20:33:55 +0100
Richard Wordingham <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Apr 2017 10:43:39 -0700
Asmus Freytag <[email protected]> wrote:
The basic text elements in the scheme other than boundary markers will
be:
empty white square
empty black square
white square with specific piece on it
black square with specific piece on it.
If the variation selectors are ignored, these simplify to:
white square
hatched square
specific piece
This preserves all the information; the pattern of squares is known in
advance and therefore redundant.
Now, Asmus's VS scheme is:
empty white square
empty black square
piece with matching spacing
piece with dark back ground and matching spacing.
Actually, I'm now leaning towards a preference for any scheme that does
not use VS, but relies on ligatures. Such a scheme would need
a) no matching spacing for the bare pieces (the ligature with the empty
square would result in the correct spacing)
b) no pieces with built-in dark background (pieces simply ligate with
the empty "black" square).
Now, what happens to the two scheme if rendered with yellow text
('foreground') on a blue background?
According to Michael, the effect should be that of lead typography.
This would mean that the entire ligature has the same ink color, and all
parts that are not "ink" are the background color (paper color).
Unlike lead typography, the ink can be perfectly opaque, allowing a
lighter color to show on a dark background. Or the opacity of the
foreground can be selected to an intermediate level, allowing the ink to
look greenish in your example.
I believe the 'empty black square' will have yellow hatching on a blue
back ground.
Will the empty white square be white or blue?
Will the 'piece with matching spacing' have a white background around
the depiction of the piece, or a blue background? What of a 'white
square with a specific piece on it'?
A piece with a *white* background is different to a piece that is
merely an outline, whether filled or not.
Unless you select an 'emoji_presentation' you do not get two-toned
glyphs, therefore "white" is always the same as "transparent". This is
true for anything in plain text, not just game pieces.
If you want to have the dark squares have a blue background, but not the
white squares, then you need to use markup to set the alternate
background colors.
(The results with a VS based system are not really different, because I
imagine, the actual glyph repertoire is identical in all alternatives
discussed so far - relying solely on ligatures has the benefit of not
involving the UTC at all, therefore it could be implemented today
without delay).
A./
Richard.
