Aw: Re: The conflicting needs of emoji

William_J_G Overington wjgo_10009 at btinternet.com
Mon Oct 17 08:08:34 CDT 2022


Marius Spix wrote as follows.


> What is the need for your 1456 middleware system when there is already 
> software like HarfBuzz doing exactly the same thing?

When I read your post I knew nothing about HarfBuzz though I think I 
remember having seen the name somewhere.

I have found the following page.

https://harfbuzz.github.io/what-does-harfbuzz-do.html

However, even if HarfBuzz can already do all that I am suggesting that a 
"not yet available and maybe never available" 1456 middleware system 
could do, neither of them can do it today because to do so first the 
Unicode Technical Committee would need to have agreed a format so that 
an end user of Unicode could write a Unicode "plain text" message that 
would provide the instructions to whichever of those two systems were 
running in the rendering system.

Those would be instructions that would be regarded by the rendering 
system as software to run in the virtual machine that is simulated in 
the rendering software so as to draw a custom character.

If the encoding using 7-bit ASCII printing characters that I used in 
2000 (as adapted and extended for this situation) were implemented using 
tag characters that could be one way to achieve progress.

Which character to use as a base character for the sequence of tag 
characters?

Preferably one that already exists so as to get things going more 
quickly.

One that makes it clear that such a sequence of instructons is in a text 
stream.

Could U+FFFC OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER be used as the base character 
for such a sequence of tag characters that are providing instructions to 
a virtual machine as to how to draw a custom character?

William Overington

Monday 17 October 2022


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