Open Crissov opened 7 years ago
Crissov
commented
7 years ago DIN 30601:1971 (now withdrawn) offered a more systematic approach for additive colors with lines for red, dashes for green and dots for blue. Hatchings of composite colors would use combinations of these basic patterns. They intentionally deviate from heraldic customs to ensure independence of drawing orientation. Black and White would be fully filled and completely blank, respectively.
Crissov
commented
7 years ago Henrik Theiling made an artificial writing system for the constructed language Toki Pona by Sonja Elen Kisa, which uses some of the patterned squares for different colors:
| Char | Codepoint | Color |
|---|---|---|
| ■ | U+25A0 | black |
| ▤ | U+25A4 | red |
| ▥ | U+25A5 | yellow, light green |
| ▦ | U+25A6 | blue-green, cyan |
| ▧ | U+25A7 | colorful |
| ☐ | U+2610 | white |
Michael Everson submitted an updated proposal, published as L2/17-394 in the Unicode document repository. The number of proposed characters and their suggested codepoints have changed:
used in English heraldic hatching for orange
used in English heraldic hatching for Or or gold or yellow
used in English heraldic hatching for bleu celeste or light blue
used in German heraldic hatching for carnation
used in English heraldic hatching for tenné or tawny light brown
used in German heraldic hatching for ashen grey
Crissov
commented
7 years ago David P. Kendal and for 12 emoji color modifiers in L2/17-355.
This set was apparently identified by Berlin and Kay in a linguistic study.
Crissov
commented
6 years ago Emoji 12.0 (2019) will add several colored hearts, squares and circles to complete the following set of color swatches:
There are still some missing, at least:
For consistency, they should also be added as Heart, Circle and Square.
Note: This is a more focused spinoff or subset of the discussion about colored/material hearts #222.
The human eye and brain can distinguish thousands if not millions of colors, but in language, we regularly only refer to a very small and thus crude subset, which depends on the domain, of course. There is only a handful of canonical color names that are used in common parlance and several dozen color designations that one would roughly understand in a special setting.
Text is predominantly monochrome, i.e. a single foreground or ink color and a single background or canvas color. Colorful characters – like emojis usually are – has been used throughout history if and where possible, though. There are some (compatibility) emojis that could be reused as color swatches, but no shape (heart, square, diamond, circle, book) already has enough variations. Some of them also do not have good monochromatic fallback. There are some existing characters, however, that are not yet emojis, but could work as conventional representations of colors in B&W text: hatching squares.
There are various conventions to match colors (or surface materials) with hatching patterns, but the one originating from European heraldry is probably best known and most suitable. There are existing characters for, at least, blue, red, green, purple, black and white swatches, which would just require an emoji presentation variation selector U+FE0F (VS-16) appended. This would be recorded in
emoji-variation-sequences.txtand could be done without waiting for an update to the Unicode Standard, since such emoji data is governed by UTS51. There was already a proposal to Unicode to add additional pattern squares, which would be introduced in a future release of the Unicode Standard (i.e. 11.0 in June 2018 or later).--horizontal stripes\|\|vertical stripes++square pattern, orthogonal crosshatch\\forward diagonals//backward diagonals/\diagonal crosshatchXXdiamond pattern (German)..dotted-\horizontal-forward crosshatch-/horizontal-backward crosshatch\|\vertical-forward crosshatch\|/vertical-backward crosshatch (English)\|/vertical-backward crosshatch (German)flesh, skin\|vertical dashed\|-alternating dashed-.horizontal dash-dotted (Spanish: green)!vertical dash-dotted.-.dotted horizontal stripes (Spanish).\|.dotted vertical stripes (English)Michael Everson's proposal from April 2011 had new Square With ... Fill characters at U+2B60..2B71. These codepoints have since been delegated to some arrows. The block Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows U+2Bxy still has some other unassigned slots that could be used instead, e.g. U+2BD2..2BEB or U+2BF0..2BFF.
..or, gold, yellowSQUARE WITH DOTTED FILL(en)-\sanguine, dark redSQUARE WITH HORIZONTAL AND UPPER LEFT TO LOWER RIGHT FILL(en)-/tenné, orange-tawnySQUARE WITH HORIZONTAL AND UPPER RIGHT TO LOWER LEFT FILL(en)|\maroon, brownSQUARE WITH VERTICAL AND UPPER LEFT TO LOWER RIGHT FILL(en+de)|/fey, grey; blood redSQUARE WITH VERTICAL AND UPPER RIGHT TO LOWER LEFT FILL(en; de)+\earthSQUARE WITH ORTHOGONAL CROSSHATCH AND UPPER LEFT TO LOWER RIGHT FILL(de)-waterSQUARE WITH OFFSET HORIZONTAL LINE FILL(de)|fleshSQUARE WITH OFFSET VERTICAL LINE FILL(de)-|-cendrée, ashen greySQUARE WITH ALTERNATING VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL FILL(en+de)-.greenSQUARE WITH HORIZONTAL LINE AND DOT FILL(es)|.orangeSQUARE WITH VERTICAL LINE AND DOT FILL(en).-.greenSQUARE WITH ALTERNATING HORIZONTAL LINE AND DOT FILL(es)Lnatural, properSQUARE WITH UPPER LEFT TO LOWER RIGHT STEPPED FILL(de)Jnatural, properSQUARE WITH UPPER RIGHT TO LOWER LEFT STEPPED FILL(cz)+steelSQUARE WITH CROSS FILL(it)xsanguine, dark redSQUARE WITH X FILL(it)(natural, properSQUARE WITH SEMI-CIRCLE FILL(it).|.tenné, orange-tawnySQUARE WITH ALTERNATING VERTICAL LINE AND DOT FILL(en)The 16 original CGA / VGA / HTML3.2 / CSS1 colors come in light/dark = high/low pairs:
whitesilvergrayblackwhiteblacksilvergrayredmaroonyellowolivelimegreenaquatealbluenavyfuchsiapurpleOnce agreed upon (and added) as emojis, these color swatches could be used in Emoji ZWJ Sequences to designate the predominant color(s) of the emoji that precedes them. This could be a hair color, car paint, nail polish, blossom color, nib ink, symbol tint etc. Any frequent combination would be documented in
emoji-zwj-sequences.txt. (Skin complexion is already dealt with by dedicated combining Emoji Modifier characters U+1F3FA..F that are based upon the Fitzpatrick scale, but combine its first two values into one. If added, X+2Bx7 carnation might need to become an Emoji Modifier Base.)For UTC150 in November 2016, @pauldhunt (unsuccessfully) proposed 10 new characters for color swatches in L2/16-318, which map to U+25A5 ▥, U+2BxA, U+2Bx0, U+25A7 ▧, U+25A4 ▤, U+25A8 ▨, U+25A1 □, U+25A6 ▦, U+25A9 ▩/2BxE/2Bx8 and U+2Bx3 above:
Proposals
Standard References