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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

#32

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...

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

#34

Post by the8472 »

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 have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's perfectly fine for latin characters.

Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from the other control pictures.

␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛ ␜ ␝ ␞ ␟ ␠ ␡

How those look on display w/o pixel scaling: https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png

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

#35

Post by mappu »

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…

https://materialdesignicons.com/ makes a font available with a reasonably large selection of brand and functionality icons, using unicode private ranges (also svg or whatever).

I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode.

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

#36

Post by yk »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #27
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 point…

Your answer illustrates my point perfectly, first the lack of a reasonable fall back mechanism. Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point ( and theoretically add that character to a open font). A default font would just ship with every OS out there, and suddenly there would be a working fall back.

Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. (That is not helped by the roughly 17 standardized encodings that mostly agree with utf-8.)

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

#38

Post by mrb »

hackuser wrote: post #13

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 t…

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

Well the answer is clear: each code point represents one visual image, to which is associated one or more meanings.

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

#39

Post by malz »

bsder wrote: post #31

The past tense of "lead" (rhymes with bead) is not also "lead". When did the word "led" disappear from the English language?

It hasn't disappeared (Google Ngram viewer shows a consistent occurrence of "led" since 1800). It's just a common error due to (1) inconsistency with "read" (same spelling for present and past tense) and (2) the noun "lead" being pronounced "led".
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