I'm having trouble understanding what this does. Apparently there's a popover when you select the text you typed. I had to go to https://github.com/ekmartin/unicode-style to figure this out.
𝔇𝔬𝔱𝔥 𝔨𝔫𝔬𝔴 𝔥𝔬𝔴 𝔱𝔬 𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔰𝔞𝔦𝔡 𝔞𝔲𝔱𝔬𝔪𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔡 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔬𝔭𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫?
Show HN: unicode.style
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#42This reveals all kinds of bugs in current software. For example, if I use the tool to make a url italic, then pasting that url into Chrome's url bar gives me back a bunch of unicode rectangles. But that's not what I wanted. I wanted Chrome's url bar to interpret those unicode code points as an italic version of the actual unicode code points I want. Chrome should add a check for edge cases like these and add branches…
Ugh. This just further poisons me against unicode being a good thing. ASCII or bust. "ABCD" and "𝓐𝓑𝓒𝓓" are the same thing, but they also aren't. Am I supposed to normalize everything on username creation to prevent people from making duplicates?
You either have to do that, or restrict usernames to ASCII subset only (and face the wrath of non-Latin alphabet users), or restrict to a whitelist of ranges that only represent alpha characters across all languages (i.e. not math symbols, nor box-drawing, nor emoji, etc.)
i8n is complicated because the diversity of language is itself complicated. I feel your pain, though, don't get me wrong.
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#43Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
Well, look forward to spammers using this to bypass the spam filters...
Followed by spam filters keying in on use of such alternative/modifier characters and marking them as spam. Better check your spam folder if you get a lot of e-mails with mathematical formulas.
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#44Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
> Screen readers don't do very well with this
Badly-implemented screen readers don't do very well with this. The Unicode Standard provides a Normalization Form for Compatibility Decomposition (NFKD / NFKC) that screen readers definitely should adopt in their Unicode implementation [1].
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#45Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
To be fair, combining some of the HN comments:
$ python
Python 3.7.0 (default, Jul 22 2018, 21:11:34)
[Clang 9.1.0 (clang-902.0.39.2)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import unicodedata as ud
>>> ud.normalize('NFKD', '''It's a kinda ascii-art thing that 𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔰 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔴𝔢𝔯 𝔥𝔫 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔰 𝔞𝔩𝔩 𝔣𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔶 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰. 𝕆𝕣 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕚𝕗 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕥 𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕤 𝕘𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕔 𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕖.
...
... 𝙸𝚜𝚗'𝚝 𝚞𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚘𝚍𝚎 𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝?''')
"It's a kinda ascii-art thing that lets you answer hn comments all fancy like this. Or like this if you want less gothic more outline.\n\nIsn't unicode great?"
>>>
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#46This reveals all kinds of bugs in current software. For example, if I use the tool to make a url italic, then pasting that url into Chrome's url bar gives me back a bunch of unicode rectangles. But that's not what I wanted. I wanted Chrome's url bar to interpret those unicode code points as an italic version of the actual unicode code points I want. Chrome should add a check for edge cases like these and add branches…
Ugh. This just further poisons me against unicode being a good thing. ASCII or bust. "ABCD" and "𝓐𝓑𝓒𝓓" are the same thing, but they also aren't. Am I supposed to normalize everything on username creation to prevent people from making duplicates?
Not normalise, just set the rules you want to apply. Internationalised domain names suffer this issue, so cribbing their fix probably would work for you - pick a script, restrict allowable characters to it.
You probably never want to allow unrestricted use of any character set for a username, even ASCII - otherwise I could take the username 'bjt2n3904 '.
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#47Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
Speaking of styling things for novelty, there's also this
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#48I would make it more clear what the app does and that you should highlight text to format it.
I discovered that by accident.
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#49Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
To be fair, combining some of the HN comments: $ python Python 3.7.0 (default, Jul 22 2018, 21:11:34) [Clang 9.1.0 (clang-902.0.39.2)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import unicodedata as ud >>> ud.normalize('NFKD', '''It's a kinda ascii-art thing that 𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔰 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔴𝔢𝔯 𝔥𝔫 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔰 𝔞𝔩𝔩 𝔣𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔶 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰. 𝕆𝕣 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕚…
I often wonder how many of the people who bring up the capabilities of screen readers are actually familiar with screen readers. (I'm admittedly not at all familiar with screen readers or their capabilities).
Re: Show HN: unicode.style
#50Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.
Well, look forward to spammers using this to bypass the spam filters...
Don't they already do that? I can clearly remember subjects that mixed latin, cyrillic, greek and some more exotic scripts to do just that.