# A puzzle with a purpose **URL:** \ **Category:** Font Related Information\ **Created:** [May 14, 2009, 9:39am UTC](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496 "2009-05-14T09:39:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![William](https://forum.high-logic.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/b19c9b/32.png) [@William](https://forum.high-logic.com/u/William)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 9:39am UTC](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496/1 "2009-05-14T09:39:57Z")
Some readers may have read the thread in the Gallery forum about my experiments with Localizable Sentences expressed as Unicode characters. I am adding some sentences and some glyphs to represent colours. For example, the following. U+F9105 LOCALIZABLE SENTENCE THE COLOUR IS GREEN. I have produced fourteen glyphs, one for each of the following colours, black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, grey, white, cyan, pink, dark grey, light grey. I have been testing the font and have produced the following graphic showing the fourteen glyphs in a random order. locse005\_random\_order.png The puzzle is to try to deduce the order in which the glyphs representing the colours are displayed in the graphic. I have tried to design the glyphs by using the line shadings used in the Petra Sancta method for depicting colours in old black and white books on heraldry, though that does not cover all of the colours used in this list of fourteen colours, though it does have some shadings to represent colours that I have not used. Hopefully the puzzle will be of interest to some readers and will be fun to try to solve. The puzzle also has a purpose in that I have tried to design the glyphs so that people already familiar with the Petra Sancta method will hopefully have an intuitive feel for which colour is being represented. So I am wondering whether I have been successful. Readers are invited to post their suggested solutions to the problem together with any comments that they choose to make as to the ease or difficulty of deciding which glyph is intended to represent which colour. I shall try to add a spoiler protector at the end of this post so that if people do post solutions then the solutions will not be displayed to someone wishing to try the puzzle without first reading the solution! William Overington 14 May 2009 # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ---
**Author:** ![William](https://forum.high-logic.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/b19c9b/32.png) [@William](https://forum.high-logic.com/u/William)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2009, 8:31am UTC](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496/2 "2009-05-19T08:31:38Z")
Here are some links to the Petra Sancta system of indicating colours using monochrome lines. As it happens I did not know of these two pages when I produced my designs. > **[Hatching (heraldry)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatching_system)** > > Hatching (sometimes called hachure, from the French word) is a conventional system for monochrome denotation of heraldic armory, whereby the tinctures (colours) are represented by dots and lines. This technique is employed in cases where colours, for either aesthetic, practical or economic reasons are not reproduced – e.g. on surfaces such as woodcuts or engravings, seals and coins. > Several systems of hatchings were developed during the Renaissance as an alternative to tricking, the earlier meth... > **[Silvester Petra Sancta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvester_Petra_Sancta)** > > Silvester Petra Sancta (1590, in Rome – 6 May 1647, in Rome) was an Italian Jesuit priest, and heraldist. His name is also spelt as Sylvester Petra Sancta, Petrasancta, in Italian Padre Silvestro da Pietrasanta. Pseudonym: Coelius Servilius > He was the confessor of the Cardinal Pier Luigi Carafa (1581–1655) from a distinguished Neapolitan family. Between 1624 and 1634, Petra Sancta stayed with Carafa in Cologne where he fought against rising Protestantism through his sermons and religious discu... Some readers of the first page mentioned above may like to know that if one downloads the full resolution version of the diagram of the more complicated hatchings to local storage and then opens that file in Paint and one then displays the image at 8x magnification, then the detailed design of those more complicated hatchings is displayed on-screen. > **[File:Nemheraldikus színek vonalkázása,.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nemheraldikus_sz%C3%ADnek_vonalk%C3%A1z%C3%A1sa,.png)** > > Hatching of additional tintctures and hatching variants > GFDL > GNU Free Documentation License > //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text\_of\_the\_GNU\_Free\_Documentation\_License > This licensing tag was added to this file as part of the GFDL licensing update. > Any user may perform this transfer; refer to Wikipedia:Moving files to Commons for details. I found that the hatching for water-colour was amongst several that I did not know before. William Overington 19 May 2009 ---
**Author:** ![William](https://forum.high-logic.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/b19c9b/32.png) [@William](https://forum.high-logic.com/u/William)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2009, 10:32am UTC](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496/3 "2009-05-19T10:32:47Z")
The solution to the puzzle is now available in the following thread. > [@Solution to a puzzle with a purpose.](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/solution-to-a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2501/1): > > In the thread, “A puzzle with a purpose” I posed a puzzle. [https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496/1](https://forum.high-logic.com/t/a-puzzle-with-a-purpose/2496/1) This thread contains the solution to the puzzle. Readers who have not tried the puzzle and would like to do so before reading the solution may like to follow the above link before reading any more in this thread. Here is a copy of the image from the puzzle thread. locse005\_random\_order.png The puzzle is to try to deduce the order in which the glyphs representing the colo… William Overington 19 May 2009