Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

--- Garth Wallace <gwalla@...> wrote:
> Gary Shannon wrote:
> > Toying around with a different way to tell
> software
> > how to draw a pictographic character:
> >
> > http://fiziwig.com/ptgylph2.html
> >
> > Fonts may not be the right way to go for
> pictographic
> > languages since they were initially designed for
> > alphabetic languages, and have to be coerced into
> > fitting ideograms or pictograms.
>
> That's kind of how vector fonts work, AIUI. You seem
> to be saying that
> Piktok should be encoded by a sequence of vector
> glyph descriptions,
> instead of keeping glyphs and abstract characters
> notionally separate.
> Is that right?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by notionally
separate. But the idea is to let the "character code"
BE the vector list.  That way new glyphs can be added
effortlessly without having to modify, update and
distribute a new font to include the new glyphs.  If I
write a document that contains a glyph your computer
has never seen before, your software would still know
how to draw the glyph by decoding its character code.

--gary

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