Encoding italic

[Khaled Hosny via Unicode]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 10:42:59PM +0000, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 18:24:07 +0200
> Khaled Hosny via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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:  
> 
> >>> 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 limitations of rendering technology should not be an argument
> against an encoding.  We have characters that differ only in their
> properties, such as word-breaking and line-breaking.

They are already encoded, in their modern uncolored form. Some of the
modern forms like U+06E5 ARABIC SMALL WAW, U+06E5 ARABIC SMALL WAW, etc.
were even specifically “invented” in the previous century to overcome
the impracticality of printing in multiple colors, so the colored and
uncolored forms are different representations of the same underlying
characters.
 
> In this case, it may be argued that their colours apply only to their
> 'plain' colouring.  Who determines what their colour should be in blue
> text?  (Font technology seems to dictate that their colour is
> unaffected by the choice of foreground colour.)

The colors don’t change, the vowel marks are always red, the hamza is
always green/yellow.