<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </head> <body><div class="auto-created-dir-div" dir="auto" style="unicode-bidi: embed;"><style>p{margin:0}</style><p>In October 2022 I produced some designs for language-independent signs for art galleries.</p><p><br></p><p>The first post in the thread shows the designs.</p><p><br></p><p>https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/169391-language-independent-signs-for-art-galleries/<br></p><p><br></p><p>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</p><p><br></p><p>Thank you for visiting</p><p><br></p><p>in English and a similar message in about five other languages, all on the one sign, one language in each paragraph vertically arranged.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet not every language, so my design of a sign for</p><p><br></p><p>Thank you for visiting</p><p><br></p><p>is language-independent, so all languages are treated equally.</p><p><br></p><p>I have since then purchased some A3 landscape prints from an online virtual print house and indeed have one of each design on display.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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,</p><p><br></p><p>256, 256, 1;</p><p><br></p><p>and an off curve point as</p><p><br></p><p>256,1792, 0;</p><p><br></p><p>then adding 1792, 1792, 1; and 1792, 256, 1; and closing the loop, in one colour,</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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. </p><p><br></p><p>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). </p><p><br></p><p>Is this a suggestion that people here consider good?</p><p><br></p><p>Can it be implemented please?</p><p><br></p><p>William Overington</p><p><br></p><p>Wednesday 29 November 2023</p><p><br></p></div></body></html>