How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
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How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#2ᛈοοו
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#3> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9!
Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#4I wonder when will Windows add support?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#5> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
There is exactly that!
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#6> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
[deleted]
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#7> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
Sort of. Font substitution is a thing in most operating systems. As long as one font on the system has those characters it should work.
Not always true though, and can depend on the application using the right system calls for rendering text (for example).
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#8> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS) they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a "last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1].
A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be variable width.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#9I wonder if HN is going to complain about the frivolity and uselessness of these the way they incessantly complain about emoji every time a Unicode thread comes up?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#10> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9! Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not implemented?
This isn't even possible for most font formats. There are over 100k assigned code points, but TTF and OTF both use unsigned 16-bit glyph indices, giving a maximum of 65,536 glyphs per font. Not all code points map to glyphs, but some glyphs are also not directly associated to code points (for example, some Unicode combining marks require separate glyphs in certain combinations).