Images in plain text (from Re: Tags and emoji)

[William_J_G Overington]

Jim DeLaHunt wrote as follows.
> Why not take all that energy, and put it towards encouraging 
> application developers to provide ways to mix pictures as pictures 
> into the text stream?
In recent years there have been a few suggestions (by others, not me) in 
documents in the Unicode Technical Committee Document Register for such 
systems. If I remember correctly, at least one involved using tag 
characters. As far as I am aware, none have gone forward.
Reading your post I remembered that over twenty years ago I put forward 
in this mailing list a suggestion for what I called a .uof file. Trying 
to find it, as yet unsuccessfully, I found that .uof is now used as a 
suffix in an entirely different system, an office software system, so if 
my idea were to become implemented a different file extension would be 
needed.
If I remember correctly, my .uof file suggestion was such that if the 
plain text file that it accompanied had n uses of the character
U+FFFC OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
then the .uof file would have n lines of text, each line of text 
containing the name of a graphics file, either just a file name for a 
local file or a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for a file obtainable 
from the web, listed in the order that the corresponding U+FFFC 
character for the graphics file appeared in the plain text file that the 
.uof file accompanied.
Page 33 of https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch23.pdf 
<https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch23.pdf>  has some 
notes about U+FFFC.
In those days the Unicode Technical Committe Document Register was not 
publicly available. After it became publicly available to read I 
remember that I found that my suggestion of a .uof file had been 
discussed at a meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee.
So there are various ways to include graphics in, or accompaying and 
linked to, plain text file content that have been suggested.
If there is a will by the Unicode Technical Committee to go forward and 
have such a capability agreed and specified in a Unicode Technical 
Specification then there are various ideas for achieveing a result that 
have already been put forward, and other ideas maight well be devised 
too.
As for the possibility of me encouraging application developers to 
develop systems, well, I am retired and I could not credibly approach 
them suggesting they spend time and effort implementing my ideas unless 
I were in a position to pay them to do it. Yet if Unicode Inc. encoded 
the best system that can be devised, then maybe application developers 
would choose to take up that system and implement it, and progress would 
be achieved.
> Why is it so terribly important to use the mechanism of text to 
> deliver pictures in text, instead of using a application-based 
> mechanism of mixed text and pictures?
As far as I am aware, it is a matter of interoperability amongst various 
platforms and the fact that emoji are used inline with text, at various 
places within the text, not all together in the style of a diagram 
accompanying the text.
William Overington
Saturday 6 April 2024
 
 
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