On Thu, 6 Apr 2017 13:17:36 -0700 Asmus Freytag <[email protected]> wrote:
> While it appears possible, after Khaled's demonstration, I still > think that the use of "white ink" instead of the "white" parts of a > character being treated "transparent" is far from standard text > presentation. (And I've yet to see an example that's motivated by > anything other than emoji). I think multicoloured fonts for plain text are in their infancy. However, we now need to be on guard against the natural conflation of 'white' and 'transparent'. UTS#51 has a good paragraph on the topic in the 'Design Guidelines' section: "Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black” and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white” and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color." I think it would be worth making those points in the Unicode Standard - I suggest the section on 'Geometric Shapes', which is Section 22.8 in TUS 9.0.0. Of course, if U+25A1 WHITE SQUARE is the outline of a square, it then seems odd that a valid presentation form should be just a spacing glyph, as seems to be preferred for chess boards! I suppose this could be considered an edge case :-) Richard.
