Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[Khaled Hosny via Unicode]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 03:54:29PM +0000, Andrew West via Unicode wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 15:42, James Kass <jameskasskrv at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here's a very polite reply from John Hudson from 2000,
> > http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML024/1042.html
> > ...and, over time, many of the replies to William Overington's colorful
> > suggestions were less than polite.  But it was clear that colors were
> > out-of-scope for a computer plain-text encoding standard.
> 
> Going off topic a little, I saw this tweet from Marijn van Putten
> today which shows examples of Arabic script from early Quranic
> manuscripts with phonetic information indicated by the use of red and
> green dots:
> 
> https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1088171783461703682
> 
> I would be interested to know how those should be represented in Unicode.

It is possible to represent this by use of color fonts. The green
(sometimes golden) dots are the hamza, the red ones are various vowel
marks. A color font would use colored glyphs for these instead of the
modern shapes. I did a color fonts that does a similar thing (but still
use the modern forms) and it is on my to do list to do a font using
archaic Kufi forms.

Regards,
Khaled