Within the Unicode Private Use Area of the Quest text font are glyphs for expressing colours of text.
These usages of the codepoints are of my own allocation and have no official standing as regards Unicode.
In fairness to beginners I mention that including characters for such things as changes of colour in text is not the way that Unicode does things, it is my own idea.
Anyway, back in 2002 I defined some code point allocations and published them in the following document.
That is one of a collection of documents.
During the making of my Quest text font I devised glyphs for the codepoints, based on the Petra Sancta method used for expressing colours in monochrome printed books about heraldry. For example, using vertical lines for red and horizontal lines for blue. However, some, such as the glyphs for brown and orange are of my own devising. Some readers familiar with electronics hardware may recognize the resistor colour code in the order of the first ten colours in the list.
Today I have been trying to produce a pdf showing the glyphs in use.
In the event I am publishing two pdf documents.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Quest_text_colour_glyphs.pdf
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Quest_text_colour_glyphs_in_monochrome.pdf
The reason for this is that the first one shows the colours yet I have not been able to copy and paste the codepoints from the pdf to WordPad. So I tried a monochrome version and found that I could copy and paste the codepoints from the pdf to WordPad with that version.
Yet the “in monochrome” version has the glyphs in monochrome yet the panel is in yellow, so the whole image is not monochrome. I left the panel in the pdf as I was wondering whether the panel was making the copy and paste go wrong and I wanted to test that possibility.
Whilst recognizing that the codepoint allocations are just one person’s Unicode Private Use Area codepoint allocations, I would mention that the particular glyph designs are not part of the allocation. So other designs for glyphs could be used whilst still using those Unicode Private Use Area codepoint allocations for colours in the same manner.
The pdfs are both landscape format at size A3, so that they could potentially become exhibits in an art show.
William Overington
15 September 2008