Encoding colour (from Re: Encoding italic)

wjgo_10009@btinternet.com via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sat Feb 9 04:54:54 CST 2019


Egmont Koblinger wrote:

> Should this scheme be extended for colors, too? What to do with the
legacy 8/16 as well as the 256-color extensions wrt. the color
palette? Should Unicode go into the business of defining a fixed set
of colors, or allow to alter the palette colors using the OSC 4 and
friends escape sequences which supported by about half of the terminal
emulators out there?

Encoding colour is already a topic in relation to emoji and maybe could 
be extended to other characters.

A stateful method, though which might be useful for plain text streams 
in some applications, would be to encode as characters some of the 
glyphs for indicating colours and the digit characters to go with them 
from page 5 and from page 3 of the following publication.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

> What to do with things that Unicode might also want to have, but 
> doesn't exist in terminal emulators due to their nature, such as
switching to a different font size?

Well, if people were to want to do it, there could be a character 
encoded in the Specials section and then use that character as a base 
character and follow it with a sequence of tag characters.

William Overington

Saturday 9 February 2019


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