[MPEG-OTSPEC] Expressing a colourful glyph in a QR code and application of such a QR code

[William_J_G Overington]

In October 2022 I produced some designs for language-independent signs 
for art galleries.

The first post in the thread shows the designs.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/169391-language-independent-signs-for-art-galleries/

The background is that some years ago I saw, in a Google street view 
presentation of the then foyer of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New 
York, a sign that had

Thank you for visiting

in English and a similar message in about five other languages, all on 
the one sign, one language in each paragraph vertically arranged.

Yet not every language, so my design of a sign for

Thank you for visiting

is language-independent, so all languages are treated equally.

I have since then purchased some A3 landscape prints from an online 
virtual print house and indeed have one of each design on display.

The QR code encodes the code that I have assigned to the localizable 
sentence that is representable by either, or both, of a glyph and of an 
exclamation mark followed by an integer.

Having worked with a mainframe computer (an Elliott 803B) in the 1960s 
and minicomputers (Honeywell 716 and 516 in the 1970s) both of which 
used punched paper tape and an optical reader, one day it occurred to me 
that there is a resonance between (punched paper tape and an optical 
reader) and (a QR code and a smartphone) and so I wondered about the 
implications of that resonance for building software and data structures 
in a smartphone by scanning QR codes in a parallel way to how a 
minicomputer was used with a collection of paper tapes.

Also, looking at the A3 signs that I have on display it occurred to me 
that an additional QR code could be used to express the design of the 
glyph. Then I realized that, quite separately from anything to do with 
localizable sentences, that a colourful glyph (or a monochrome glyph) 
could be displayed with a QR code accompanying it where the QR code 
could be scanned by a mobile phone, or other device, and then a suitable 
software app could allow that glyph to be used as a character in the 
mobile phone or other device. The displayed glyph could be whatever type 
of display were chosen, from a large work of art at MoMA, to printed in 
a book, for example.

I realize that I could have had a go at devising a text string format to 
be included in a QR code, starting with an on curve point as, for 
example,

256, 256, 1;

and an off curve point as

256,1792, 0;

then adding 1792, 1792, 1; and 1792, 256, 1; and closing the loop, in 
one colour,

and then adding a counterclockwise contour within it, then adding a 
small square of a different colour within the first contour such that it 
does not collide with the counterclockwise contour, yet although I am 
interested in fonts I am not an expert in OpenType technology and so I 
consider that my "having a go" version would not be an ideal solution as 
various OpenType features such as colour and so on would need to be 
included and anyway no matter how good and potentially useful it would 
be it would just be a publication from an individual.

Yet if the way of encoding a glyph as a text string in a QR code were to 
be specified by OpenType experts and were to become part of the font 
standard, or an annex document related to it, then the concept could 
potentially be applied in various practical ways.

So I put forward here the general concept of encoding a single glyph in 
a QR code in such a way that the QR code could be read and the glyph 
applied in a device, the text string encoding including, optionally, one 
or more of a Unicode code point (possibly a Private Use Area code 
point), a glyph name, a Mariposa code sequence (possibly a Mariposa 
Private Use Area code sequence).

Is this a suggestion that people here consider good?

Can it be implemented please?

William Overington

Wednesday 29 November 2023

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