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Can you find the white-crested tiger heron?


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Gold star to Affinity Publisher.

I have just used Affinity Publisher beta 283 in an experiment, and it works a treat!

The really great thing is that the experiment is not about Affinity Publisher, it is about something else and Affinity Publisher provided the facility to get it done.

Only one minor glitch and maybe that can be sorted, but it is a side-issue.

Recently the following appeared in the Unicode Technical Committee Document Register.

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082-qid-emoji.pdf Please note that the PDF is over six megabytes. I found it best to download it to local storage and read it locally rather than try to read it off the web - your results may be different depending on how your internet connection performs.

Wow!

I have sent in this feedback.

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A suggestion regarding font support in relation to QID emoji
  
William Overington
  
Wednesday 3 April 2019
  
In the document L2/19-082 QID Emoji proposal, on page 3, in the section headed Interchange, there is mention of the need, if a display of the character is to be produced at the receiving end, for a font with a glyph for the character being available at the receiving end.
  
I remember that in February 2003 I started a thread in the Unicode public mailing list (please note that the email address listed by me in that thread is no longer in use) with the title ‘Hot Beverage font.’. The post is about a font that I had produced and published. The font is still available. The font includes just one glyph, for the then newly encoded U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE character, though accessible both with that code point and also with a lowercase h in case that might be helpful in some circumstances.
  
I am wondering if at the same time as the encoding of the new character that is suggested in the QID Emoji proposal document that the Unicode Technical Committee could please consider specifying a font name format and a file name format for a single glyph font for a QID emoji.
  
For example, for a font with just a single glyph for the White-crested tiger heron emoji that is mentioned in the QID Emoji document, maybe the glyph could be in a font that has a font name of fontQ218543 in a file named fontQ218543.otf so that the internet, or some part thereof, could be searched for a single glyph font for the particular emoji. If these single glyph fonts were all made available using the SIL Open Font License font licensing facility, then maybe that could be beneficial for assisting interoperability of QID emoji.
  
Reference:
  
Overington, W. J. G., Hot Beverage font. 
  
https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m02/0338.html
  
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So this afternoon I decided to try to make a maquette font to test it out.

I used the High-Logic FontCreator program to make the font. In fact, version 8 of FontCreator.

That worked a treat.

I then decided to test the font using Affinity Publisher and it works.

The liga table of the OpenType font is on by default in Affinity Publisher. It needs to be on for this experiment as the experiment depends upon a liga table glyph substitution.

The really class bit of Affinity Publisher in relation to this test is that the substitution rule in the font is as follows.

sub uniEFF8 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 -> glyph218543;

Look at that, a plane 0 Private Use Area character and seven plane 14 tag characters in a glyph substitution and Affinity Publisher did it with ease. As soon as I entered the TAG DIGIT THREE character from the Glyph Browser the White-crested tiger heron emoji glyph (maquette version! Modern Art?) was displayed!

[Supplementary note of 2019-04-06 Saturday

Please read the third and fourth posts in this thread before trying to reproduce this experiment.

This is because the font has been updated and there is now an extra character, CANCEL TAG,  that needs to be input to get the result.

]

I used 36 point type for the test.

Wow!

For the test I used a Private Use Area character, hexadecimal EFF8 as the base character, with an arrow as the glyph.

The minor side issue was that I could not get the hexadecimal EFF8 character into Affinity Publisher from the Glyph Browser.

So I used the Microsoft calculator program to find the decimal equivalent of hexadecimal EFF8 as 61432 and then used Alt 61432 in WordPad to get the character and I then used copy and paste to get it into Affinity Publisher.

I could get all of the other characters in from the glyph browser, quite straightforwardly.

The font is attached in case anyone wants to have a go at finding the white-crested tiger heron.

William Overington

Thursday 4 April 2019

 

gold_star.png

 

fontQ218543maquette2.otf

Edited by William Overington
2019-04-06 Saturday: font updated, explained later in the thread

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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By the way, my test font has a slight …. well it is not an error in the font as such but the substitution rule should have a CANCEL TAG at the end.

As it happens, yesterday I made a test font that does have a CANCEL TAG at the end of the substitution, though that test font was just for a non-existent QID just to test whether FontCreator and Affinity Publisher can handle a substitution that has sixteen characters in the left-side and I am pleased to report that they can. That means that QID emoji sequences quite a bit longer than those proposed could be used with this technique.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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I have now made a new version of the font, with a new name, fontQ218543maquette2 so that the CANCEL TAG needs to be added to the text that is entered in order to get the result.

So the substitution statement in the font is now as follows, with uE007F added to what was originally used:

sub uniEFF8 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 uE007F -> glyph218543;

I have tested it and it works well.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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Something that I noticed.

I had left Affinity Publisher open while I made the new font and installed the new font.

When I went back to Affinity Publisher it paused and then advised me that there had been a change to the fonts and it updated automatically. So Affinity Publisher had detected the addition of the font to the system.

That is good.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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28 minutes ago, William Overington said:

When I went back to Affinity Publisher it paused and then advised me that there had been a change to the fonts and it updated automatically. So Affinity Publisher had detected the addition of the font to the system.

All of the Affinity apps automatically update the font cache when fonts are installed or uninstalled, but I find that open documents don’t reflect the change unless and until I close and reopen them.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 1 month later...

There has been a development in that the following document has been published yesterday.

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19203-wd-uts51-17-draft.pdf

I refer to Annex C.2 of that document.

In that section the use of U+1F194 SQUARED ID is suggested as the base character for QID emoji.

I have thought of a mnemonic to help remember the code number - namely 1 F then the number of letters in the phrase "a memorable code".

I have now produced a maquette font that uses that base character rather than the Private Use Area character that I used before.

Here is the substitution sequence that is within the new font.

sub u1F194 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 uE007F -> glyph218543;

In order to try the experiment one needs to install the font.

So here is the sequence that one needs to enter in order to cause the display of the (stylized) glyph that represents the white crested tiger heron in these experiments.

u1F194 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 uE007F

That is, the SQUARED ID character then tag characters 2 1 8 5 4 3 then the CANCEL TAG character.

Please note that for the glyph substitution to work the OpenType liga feature needs to be on in Affinity Publisher, which it is by default.

The font fontQ218543maquette3 in the file fontQ218543maquette3.otf is attached.

You are welcome to download, install and use the font.

William Overington

Thursday 23 May 2019

 

 

 

fontQ218543maquette3.otf

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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