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

[Asmus Freytag]

Except for the narrow case of popular pictographs (read emoji) there's 
been a clear consensus that including images in a message or document is 
best realized with out-of-band information (or rich text formats that 
are not plain text, whether or not they have a plain-text source code 
format).

Anything short of a multi-vendor effort is unlikely to change that 
status quo, so all these schemes represent curiosities at best (and 
discussing them mainly has entertainment value, if that).

A./


On 4/6/2024 2:27 PM, William_J_G Overington via Unicode wrote:
>
> 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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