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Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

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Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#121

Post by cmg »

RickS wrote: post #43
shadowfaxRodeo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder actually. Google seems to understand these, you can search with them. I wouldn't be surprised if screen readers understand these symbols. They're originally for Mathematics, and I'm sure there's plenty of blind mathematicians.

It's less "can they render them" and more "do they maintain their meaning in alternate renderings". For example, it's common in these to use non-latin characters that visually resemble latin characters. But if you were to try and substitute them literally, either as their actual phonetic sound, or a latin equivalent that is semantically similar but visually different, you risk breaking the meaning. It's a bit like wh…

>It's less "can they render them" and more "do they maintain their meaning in alternate renderings".

I just entered "this is a test" on the site in Safari and enabled VoiceOver. It reads it as "Mathematical Bold Fraktur Small t. Mathematical Bold Fraktur Small h" and so on.

Completely broken for those who rely on VoiceOver as a screenreader.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#122

Post by joaomacp »

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲... 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗲.𝗴. 𝗽𝘂𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘃𝘀 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗻𝘁.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#124

Post by kazinator »

planteen wrote: post #112
kazinator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also have issues with systems that have broken 16-bit-only Unicode support (Java, Windows, ...) in which code points beyond U+FFFF have to be encoded with some surrogate pair nonsense that is likely untested in many text-handling situations.

That's like saying UTF-8 requires "nonsense" pair, triplet, or quadruplet chars. UTF-16 handles all Unicode code points just fine. UCS-2 does not. Windows transitioned from UCS-2 to UTF-16 long ago.

The problem is Windows programs, not Windows per se.

The difference is that UTF-8 gets tested in this regard; multi-byte encoding situations actually occurring in UTF-8 are not rare occurrences that only trigger on funny characters that nobody uses.

(For that matter, four-byte UTF-8 situations are in the same boat, of course, but not two- or three-.)

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#125

Post by yorwba »

planteen wrote: post #101
yorwba wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd kind of expect screen readers to be able to apply Unicode compatibility decomposition http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Canon_Compat_Equivalence since there are many characters that are just visual variants. Ligatures like ffl or the like are at least somewhat common e.g. in PDFs. On the other hand, maybe that breaks other stuff and only whitelisted characters are converted. Maybe a HN reader using a screen reader c…

That implies that PDFs work with glyph indices, not Unicode code points. How do PDFs work for shaped languages like Hindi? In a script like that, you may have glyphs without any corresponding Unicode code point. Or does the PDF perhaps store the original unshaped text?

It might just be the output of some particular programs that pre-bake their ligatures. All I know is that sometimes, I try to copy-paste text out of a PDF only to end up with some annoying ligatures interspersed throughout.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#126

Post by hinkley »

m-i-l wrote: post #114
hinkley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e n​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱

13 square boxes on Linux detracts from the effect somewhat.

Context: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

But you aren’t going to be able to read that either. Try your phone?

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#127

Post by reirob »

cyberferret wrote: post #108
momentmaker wrote: post #34

𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝚏𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚢 𝕗𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕪 𝒻𝒶𝓃𝒸𝓎 𝙛𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙮 ⓕⓐⓝⓒⓨ 🅵🅰🅽🅲🆈

Interesting - I thought using Unicode characters would break text search capability - but when I did the old Ctrl-F 'find' in Chrome and looked for the word 'fancy', it detected all of the above. Intriguing, because in another thread here, there is mention of a gothic 'a' not being treated as a standard letter 'a'...

Doesn't work for me in Firefox

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#129

Post by hinkley »

cyberferret wrote: post #108
momentmaker wrote: post #34

𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝚏𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚢 𝕗𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕪 𝒻𝒶𝓃𝒸𝓎 𝙛𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙮 ⓕⓐⓝⓒⓨ 🅵🅰🅽🅲🆈

Interesting - I thought using Unicode characters would break text search capability - but when I did the old Ctrl-F 'find' in Chrome and looked for the word 'fancy', it detected all of the above. Intriguing, because in another thread here, there is mention of a gothic 'a' not being treated as a standard letter 'a'...

One of the hardest parts of Unicode is properly implementing tolower() - which is often used for text search.

I haven’t delved into the symbol area of Unicode you’re talking about here but I’d bet those all evaluate to “fancy”.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#130

Post by bryanrasmussen »

whatshisface wrote: post #94
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the general development budget for a screen reader is compared to the development budget for Google Search services?

Compared to the marginal cost of implementing this small additional input sanitization, both budgets are infinite.

NVDA is open source https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda for me it would be an inordinately expensive use of my time, but for you?

at any rate, both budgets are not infinite, and it's infuriating to hear the described as such.

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