Teletext separated mosaic graphics

[William_J_G Overington]

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> Isn't that kind of what the Control Pictures block (U+2400) is?
…
> So if you're willing to do that, go ahead and create a program or 
> protocol that takes the ordinary graphic characters U+2400 through 
> U+2426 and handles them in some special way, creating a new layer on 
> top of plain text.
Thank you for the suggestion.
One could indeed use twenty-seven of the characters in the range U+2400 
.. U+241F in that manner.
As a short-term solution it is, in my opinion, a bit better than using a 
Private Use Area solution, much better than using twenty-seven codes 
from the range U+0080 .. U+009F and very much better than using 
twenty-seven codes from the range U+0000 . U+001F.
However, for long-term storage and archiving of teletext pages within 
documents that contain notes about them, all of those solutions have 
problems. They are all essentially markup solutions. I have had similar 
issues with one of my inventions where encoding into regular Unicode has 
thus far not been achieved as such encoding has been declared out of 
scope. Thus I have used various markup solutions in order to make 
progress. One is to use an integral sign followed by a sequence of 
circled digits. Another markup solution that I am using is an 
exclamation mark followed by ordinary digits. Both are effective, but 
are not regular Unicode plain text solutions. Maybe one day a regular 
Unicode plain text encoding will be possible. The proposal for the 
invention to become an international  standard is with ISO. There had 
been a good chance of a slide show that I produced being presented at a 
plenary conference in June 2020, but the conference was cancelled due to 
the COVID-19 situation and a virtual meeting replacement has been 
difficult to hold because of time zone issues. Maybe if ISO decides to 
standardize the invention as an international standard that it will then 
be possible to have a rigorous regular Unicode encoding of the codes, 
thus providing a plain text unambiguous non-proprietary interoperable 
format.
I opine that the elegant long-term solution for the teletext control 
characters is to encode twenty-seven codes from a block of thirty-two 
code points in plane 14, keeping one-to-one correspondence with the 
final five bits of the original teletext control code encoding. They 
could be encoded as displayable characters so as to provide a graceful, 
helpful, fallback if specialist software to act upon the characters as 
if they are teletext control characters is not available.
William Overington

Friday 9 October 2020



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