Coloured Punctuation and Annotation

[Peter Constable]

From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Asmus Freytag
Sent: Wednesday, April 5, 2017 5:30 PM

>> There are certainly MSS (in many languages) where some punctuation made of dots have some of the dots red and some black.

> Agreed, those would be a challenge to reproduce with standard font technology and in plain text.

Not at all. This capability has existed in all major OS platforms for some years now. It is what has enabled the growth of interest in Unicode emoji, but it is by no means limited to Unicode emoji: it can be used for multi-color rendering of any text in ways defined within a font. The OpenType spec supports this through a few techniques:

- Decomposing a glyph into several glyphs that are layered (z-ordered) with colour assignments.
- Glyphs expressed as embedded colour bitmaps.
- Glyphs expressed as embedded SVG.


> But for the same reason, they are out of scope for plain text (and therefore a bit irrelevant to the current discussion).

I agree, the rendering aspect is completely orthogonal to Unicode plain-text encoding.



Peter