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How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

unicodepowersymbol.com

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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#13

Post by hackuser »

As the story mentions regarding the off symbol (a circle), there are many visually identical code points that have different semantic meanings. But in this case, they added an additional semantic meaning to an existing code point.

So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic meaning? Both? It depends? Something else?

I've tried to decipher that on my own and only learned that the answer to these sorts of questions are complicated, because it's very complicated to represent all written human language via one set of rules.

So I know some of the answers to my questions above, but I'm hoping someone with real expertise can provide the fundamental rules/policies - if there are any.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#14

Post by LELISOSKA »

maybe there should be like a universal unicode for all the icons that apps might need that represent common functionality and they should be animated to represent an either on or off state for some of them. also top brand square logos should be added into the unicode as well. and then different forks/variations can be submitted for the unicode and be accepted if they are useful and good looking. also they should all be black and white and have the same theme/look similar. u like my idea?? :DD

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#17

Post by yk »

I already ranted about unicode earlier today, my main argument is, that unicode is what happens if everybody qualified thinks: "That's a great idea, of course you have to handle X and Y and Z and I just remember that I forgot to fill out several warranty cards."

This blog post is a nice example, I have absolutely no idea how these new code points are supposed to look like, since I only spend an afternoon to implement the unicode best practices from the Arch wiki, instead of subscribing to some unicode standard mailing list. (Except the one symbol which was redefined to a symbol that does not carry the semantic meaning of "standby symbol" anywhere outside of the unicode standard.)

In my opinion there are two ways forward, one burn the entire thing. Or alternatively, force the unicode committee to produce an authoritative and complete font, in triplicate, and in their own blood.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#18

Post by hunter2_ »

LELISOSKA wrote: post #14

maybe there should be like a universal unicode for all the icons that apps might need that represent common functionality and they should be animated to represent an either on or off state for some of them. also top brand square logos should be added into the unicode as well. and then different forks/variations can be submitted for the unicode and be accepted if they are useful and good looking. also they should all…

Sounds pretty awesome!

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#19

Post by pavanky »

medgno wrote: post #8
smegel wrote: post #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?

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 symb…

And I see a boxes (on linux)
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