[XeTeX] Diacritics in color

[Ross Moore]

Hi Tobias,


On 03/12/2011, at 6:06, Tobias Schoel <liesdiedatei at googlemail.com> wrote:

> As a teacher I can think of some more Applications. Of course, these are pedagogical:
> 
> Teaching scripts to beginners (learning to write a primary school, learning to write in a different script when learning another language (or even in the same language: Mongol?):
> 
> You might want to color single parts of a glyph in order to highlight them. So, for example in a handwritten (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift or english equivalents I haven't found in the time) "a" the beginning or end-strokes might be colored.

Yes, but are these examples really requiring parts of the same whole character coloured differently?

Presuming that the font did allow access to individual glyphs, as if separate characters, then would not all meaningful aspects be equally well (if not better) encoded by an overlay?
That is, position a coloured version of the required glyph over the full character in monochrome.

In the pedagogical setting, you are presumably talking about the single stroke as a sub-part of the whole character, so it deserves to be placed as an entity in itself.
This is quite different to a colored diacritical mark modifying the meaning of a character.

> 
> Of course the font creator has to create sub-glyphs or other fancy stufff, but XeTeX should allow (re)composition of the glyph with different colors.
> 
> bye
> 
> Toscho

Hope this helps,

       Ross