Playing cards

The upcoming Unicode 6.0 standard brings us a host of symbol characters, among them a block called “Playing Cards” at U+1F0A0. The symbols there represent the Minor Arcana of the Tarot deck (or the traditional western 52-card deck plus four Knights, if you prefer), of which at least some are usually illustrated in more or less detail.

The Unicode code charts shows complete cards, albeit with stylized illustrations. This is a sensible design choice for representative glyphs. George Douros’ Symbola even features full-fledged b/w illustrations, but the level of detail requires the card symbols to be set apart from the text body at larger point sizes.

Since the DejaVu fonts is first and foremost a screen font, playing cards would not fit in with this approach. Fortunately the semantics of a playing card symbol is relatively simple: it is a card, it belongs to one of the four suits (♠♥♦♣) and it has a rank. The following poker game example shows a minimalistic approach to get this information across:

Rendered point size 8 the cards are still recognizable

This kind of graphical representation should be familiar to most people, either from television (before HDTV) or from mobile games, where space is at a premium.

One thing to keep in mind is, that while the playing cards are depicted with French suits in the code charts, they are unified with equivalent suits in other cultures. So U+1F0AB PLAYING CARD JACK OF SPADES for instance could also be shown as page of swords of the Minor Arcana or Grün-Bube in German suits.

The patch containing the card glyphs is more or less ready, they will be included in version 2.33 of DejaVu.

References:

• http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2009/11/whats-new-in-unicode-60.html
• http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.0.0/charts/blocks/U1F0A0.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card