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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

#21

Post by detaro »

yk wrote: post #17

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…

Well, if you want to know what they can look like, the blogpost has images, an embedded webfont and links to the reference font for the new symbols. And AFAIK providing reference images that are freely usable is required for all new symbol proposals.

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

#22

Post by pron »

yk wrote: post #17

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…

I think that the BMP -- Basic Multilingual Plane or the first 16-bit of Unicode characters -- is pretty reasonable, and covers fairly well everything we may consider as text (all alphabets in current use plus mathematical symbols). Anything beyond that, from emojis and pictograms to ancient Greek musical notation is pretty... weird.

I think it would have made much more sense to have something like image tags: a special codepoint would introduce a link to a URL containing a sequence of glyphs, followed by an index into that sequence. Those glyphs would be guaranteed not to change (in any meaningful way), and devices would be free to cache them. This way, anything that isn't real text, would standardize representation, too, instead of just a vague "meaning". Another standard could relate those glyphs to one another in some way, giving them standard semantics and means of translation (i.e. "Egyptian hieroglyphics"). This would also allow each of those (emojis or hieroglyphics) to evolve their standards independent of a single universal standard that means little.

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

#23

Post by aarongolliver »

pavanky wrote: post #19
medgno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Same on win10/chrome. Works on edge though.

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

#25

Post by kalleboo »

pavanky wrote: post #19
medgno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

On my Mac it gets displayed with "Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyhs" which appears to be included in the system (/Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support) but can be downloaded for other platforms from here https://www.google.com/get/noto/

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

#27

Post by johncolanduoni »

yk wrote: post #17

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 tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/. If you really wanted you can make them into a font (most of them seem to be vectorized), but since I'm guessing you see most of the added code points as useless why do you care if they show up as boxes? What harm is this stuff causing or going to cause to the standard? We have hundreds of thousands of unassigned code points.

Meanwhile, a lot of the "Ys and Zs" added to Unicode have proved to be extremely useful. Unicode's math operator and letter-styling support is what made MathJax (and more generally MathML) possible. They've also helped big time when it comes to accessibility (e.g. screen readers) for mathematics on the internet. Should we have shunted that off to another standard and made the creators of screen readers completely restructure their offerings so they can deal with Unicode characters and "Mathicode" characters? Assuming anyone bothered to implement it, how would that be better than just adding a Unicode category and spending a meager amount of space?

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

#28

Post by benkuykendall »

pavanky wrote: post #19
medgno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's not an inherent problem with GNU/Linux. Shows up fine for me because I have "ttf-ancient-scripts" (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/) installed.

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

#30

Post by pcr0 »

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…

I see a box with these two lines inside it:

013

034

OSX 10.11.4

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