node_ue wrote:

> Also, if this were to be encoded in Unicode, how would that be done?
> Would only 3 glyphs be encoded, with the color decided by markup? Or
> *gasp* would color be encoded in Unicode?

Unicode encodes characters, not pieces of glyphs...

E.g., letter "K" is encoded as a single character code, not as a code for
the left-side stem "I" plus a code for the right-side angular stroke "<".

Imagine that, in an hypothetical "chromatographic" alphabet, "A" is a green
triangle, "B" is a fuchsia triangle, "G" is a green square, and so on:
Unicode would not encode glyphic components such as "triangle shape",
"square shape", "color green", "color fuchsia", etc., but rather: "letter
A", "letter B", "letter G"...

Now imagine an hypothetical "chromatographic" abugida, where consonant "K"
is a circle, consonant "G" is a square, consonant "J" is a lozenge, etc.,
and vowel sign "A" is blue, vowel sign "I" is red, etc., so that a blue
circle represents syllable "KA", a red square represents syllable "GI" and
so on. Even in this case, Unicode would not encode visual objects such as
"circle", "square", "lozenge", "blue", "red", etc., but rather: "letter K",
"letter G", "letter J", ..., "vowel sign A", "vowel sign I", etc.

The only point where Unicode would be affected by these "chromatographic"
scripts is that, on The Unicode Standard book, the pages showing the code
chart for those scripts would be definitely better if printed in color.

_ Marco