In your minds eye...

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Keith Harris
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Joined: Sat Jul 10, 2010 3:42 am

In your minds eye...

Post by Keith Harris »

As you continually update and your baby, Font Creator, where do you foresee the font industry going? Dated existing specifications suck.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: In your minds eye...

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

There is not much anyone can guess from your post regarding what you think is wrong from existing specification.

I doubt very much whether there's anything users can say to influence it. Such specs are set by Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and the Unicode Consortium — all that High-Logic can do is decide which features are worth supporting.
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William
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Re: In your minds eye...

Post by William »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:... — all that High-Logic can do is decide which features are worth supporting.
The standardization process has a rule that if someone (individual or company) puts forward a proposal for standardization, then that person has to agree to provide a working demonstration.

I put forward some ideas for how to extend the COLR/CPAL model so as to provide colour shading of glyphs as well as the existing solid colour.

Yet I could not formally propose them for standardization as I do not have the facilities to provide a working demonstration.

If High-Logic chose to produce a working demonstration of a proposed new feature for fonts, whether that feature was suggested from within High-Logic or from within the High-Logic community and used with permission or from the open literature, then High-Logic could put that proposal forward to the standardization committee.

Whether High-Logic chooses to do that is a policy decision for High-Logic.

William Overington

7 June 2014
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Re: In your minds eye...

Post by William »

Here is my idea for colour shading within polychromatic glyphs.

The idea builds upon the COLR/CPAL format that Microsoft put forward.

At present, in a polychromatic glyph, there is, for each solid colour layer, one solochromatic glyph to provide that solid colour layer.

For a shaded colour layer, I am suggesting using a sequence of three solochromatic glyphs to provide that shaded colour layer.

A polychromatic glyph could contain at least one layer, of which there could be zero or more solid colour layers and zero or more shaded colour layers.

In a shaded colour layer, the three solochromatic glyphs would each contain a copy of the same contour.

The second of those three glyphs and the third of those three glyphs would each be coloured using a single solid colour.

The first of the three glyphs would contain an index code that, as with code FFFF, is defined outside of the palette and has a special meaning.

For example, say, code FFF1 could mean that the shading is from left to right using the colour in the second glyph of the set of three glyphs at the left and the colour of the third glyph of the set of three glyphs at the right.

There could be a choice of several codes available so as to choose the type of shading: for example, left to right, upper to lower, upper left to lower right, and so on.

An advanced option would be to have radial shading from the centre of the bounding box of the contour that is in the first of the set of three glyphs, in which case the first glyph of the set of three glyphs could contain a different contour than the contour in the second and third glyphs of the set of three glyphs.

William Overington

7 June 2014
William
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Re: In your minds eye...

Post by William »

I remembered this thread today as a result of reading the following post in the Unicode Mailing List.

https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unico ... /0179.html

I seem to remember suggesting somewhere that FFFE could be assigned as decoration colour 1 and FFFD could be assigned as decoration colour 2 and that applications could then set some user-chosen colours or use a default colour provided by the font.

For example, a font could have holly leaves and holly berries as decorations around letters and digits and so on, with colour FFFE as green and colour FFFD as red as the colour scheme suggested by the font. Some applications could, if the end user so chose, change the colours used in the display; for example to, say, silver and gold respectively.

William Overington

Thursday 22 February 2018
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