2017-04-05 18:28 GMT+02:00 William_J_G Overington <[email protected] >:
> For example, where WOMAN ZWJ ROCKET produces a glyph for a LADY ASTRONAUT, > thus a change of meaning and I think that it went to UTC as there was a > change of meaning but I am not congruently sure of that.. > > SQUARE ZWJ CHESSPIECE or CHESSPIECE ZWJ SQUARE produces a CHESSPIECE ON A > SQUARE, thus a change of meaning. > You're right here. The absence of ZWJ clearly means separate symbols side by side (wether they will align vertically or match their metrics is not relevant here but we already see that this is a problem for displaying actual boards with the "method" proposed by Micheal Everson for use in plain text, which just looks for me as only a hack (not a serious encoding proposal), just as if we were replacing all German sharp s letters by Greek beta letters, only because they more or less "look the same". You can perfectly have a board displayed beside normal text which may contain some chess pieces, not intended to combine with the surrounding board, even if both symbols may also appear side by side (with independant metrics) in text paragraphs. Given what has been encoded for other Emojis, ZWJ should be usd between symbols that are supposed to combine visually (such as MAN+WOMAN). The encoding should still respect the logic, just like we do in normal scripts (independantly of the fact they may have different visual ordering/layout, or could have similar glyphs properly disunified because of their needed distinct semantic properties). Note als othat these "chess pieces" are not just intended to be used only with chesses, and various board types may be used (not only with square cells, for example there are rectangular ones or triangular for Shogi pieces in Japan, the cell colors also have their own meanings, and special boards may have their own cells changing colors to add other rules). Note that Shogi has other pieces with distinct semantics. The pieces are generally flat and can be tuned to the other side to show their promotion. Traditional pieces use cursive Kanjis, but there are modernised **variants** using linear glyph shapes, or westernized shapes with Latin letters or geometric symbols, or even reusing the chess pieces (including the Queen for the Gold General; or the King for the Jewel/Jade General/Master and for its "White" Challenger), but making distinctions between horses (horses-dragoons) and cavalry. When promoting using chess pieces, the promotion may be shown by placing the chess piece.on top of a draught piece or coin/token. Coins/tokens are used to promote pawns (just stack two pieces like in draught game).
