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

[Asmus Freytag]

On 4/7/2024 6:44 PM, Joao S. O. Bueno via Unicode wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 6:39 AM Asmus Freytag via Unicode
> <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>> 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).
> Actually,  for certain kinds of image all the "out of band"
> information needed is that the text should be rendered with a
> monospaced font, with no spacing around characters - with that, images
> can be rendered using block characters,

... there's always the compatibility / legacy exception for everything 
in Unicode :)

But invoking that also means no future items will be encoded as there's 
no existing legacy to match.

A./

> 1/4 blocks and sextant characters included in the Vintage block, or
> even take in account glyph shapes for interesting "ASCII art". Oh,
> yes, this also needs control characters for at least "new line" and
> "carriage return" to go in band (not the case for HTML rendered text
> for example)
>
>
>> 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 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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