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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

#51

Post by yk »

detaro wrote: post #21
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.

It does not work on Firefox with noScript. (And as a matter of fact, prohibiting random blog posts from rendering unicode, executing complex numerical calculations on my graphics card or delivering exploits is kind of the purpose of noScript...)

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

#52

Post by mungoman2 »

yk wrote: post #36
johncolanduoni wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point

Tip: a quicker way is to copy the unrendered box and Google it.

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

#53

Post by jhanschoo »

coddingtonbear wrote: post #42
mrb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That is not the compromise struck, though; there are even many Cyrillic glyphs that are visually identical to those in Latin, but assigned differing codepoints.

There are multiple reasons for that, one of which is compatibility with previous encodings and standards. If a previous encoding Unicode wanted to be compatible with encoded these as different characters, Unicode needs these to have separate code points for them too.

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

#54

Post by lifthrasiir »

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?

There are some, and I have tried to make one myself [1] to learn OpenType and scripts. It is hard and takes much time and effort to get a good one (Noto fonts [2] are probably the closest font that covers the entire Unicode and looks great). I admit that it is still hard even when you don't have the looks-good requirement.

[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison

[2] https://www.google.com/get/noto/

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

#55

Post by tangus »

How did the Unicode Consortium turn around. I remember 10 years ago they were refusing to add standard media icons because

>The scope of the Unicode Standard (and ISO/IEC 10646) does not extend to encoding every symbol or sign that bears meaning in the world.

>This list has been round and round and round on this -- regular as clockwork, about once a year, the topic comes up again. And I see no indication that the UTC or WG2 are any closer to concluding that bunches of icons should start being included in the character encoding standards simply on the basis of their being widespread and recognizable icons.

>Where is the defensible line between "Fast Forward" and "Women's Restroom" or "Right Lane Merge Ahead" or "Danger Crocodiles No Swimming"?

(http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m08/0371.h...)

Now it looks they add whatever somebody thinks of. I guess it's related to the liberation from the BMP.

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

#56

Post by skybrian »

yk wrote: post #44
pron wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speci…

I mostly agree. In my opinion, separating code points from encodings (without providing a replacement for txt files) was the original sin of unicode. That just adds a lot of complexity with very little gain. (Suppose we would have standardized from ASCII to a 64 bit per character standard encoding, then text files would grow by a factor of 8 and nothing important would have happened.^1) ^1 I am pretty sure that some…

Text files growing by 8x would be a non-starter. It would be nice to standardize on something but what do you have against UTF8?

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

#57

Post by dang »

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?

We fixed it in the title above. Don't forget that we're fortunate enough to have a great many non-native English speakers here.

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

#59

Post by pron »

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…

But all mathematical symbols, except for styled math letters (which would have been equally well served by simply rendering them in italics or in a special math font), were already in the original 16-bit Unicode, as are any characters humans normally associate with "text" (all alphabets except for Egyptian hieroglyphics and other extinct alphabets). How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation?

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

#60

Post by peterburkimsher »

TIL that the SI units all have Unicode symbols. http://www.marathon-studios.com/unicode/categories/So/Other_...

If people actually used these, it would make searching text for formulae much easier. Wikipedia editors and academic publishers, please note.

Also, there's no Unicode for screwdriver. Perhaps iFixit would like to campaign for that?

Congratulations on getting the power symbols in! When @edent writes "Will update ... when I stop dancing", was it "I got the power"?

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