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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

#61
Truly amamzing man!

I was actually wondering about the electrical symbols for logic gates, such as AND, OR, NOR, XOR, NOT, etc. I would hope they were universally accepted by now and would help when writing books or describing logic. A quick Duck Duck search revealed nothing...?

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

#62
post #55

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…

>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.

Until Unicode has a half-star character, it won't even be able to encode the average newspaper.

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

#63
post #36

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…

> 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

No, last time I checked you are not legally allowed to do that.

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

#64
post #61

Truly amamzing man! I was actually wondering about the electrical symbols for logic gates, such as AND, OR, NOR, XOR, NOT, etc. I would hope they were universally accepted by now and would help when writing books or describing logic. A quick Duck Duck search revealed nothing...?

Do you mean in Unicode or in general?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate#Symbols

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

#65
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not bad, but it's complicated, as it requires an O(n) algorithm to jump to a specific character. Unicode should have been capped at 16 bits, and doubling text files in size is fine. An alternate representation of simplified UTF-8 would have kept compatibility with old ASCII files.

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

#66
The success of the unicodepowersymbol proposal inspired me to suggest a couple characters to Unicode (the Bitcoin sign and IBM's group mark from 1960s mainframes, which were accepted). The point is that Unicode really is open to proposals from random people; you don't need to part of a big company to influence Unicode.

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is the surefire way to incorporate complexities from 2 different systems into 1.

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

#69
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.

Yes, but they have alternate italic forms, for example. Sure, some one of the glyphs like с doesn't have an alternate italic form. Since the other ones do, it would be weird to only assign a separate codepoint to some of them and overlap the others. It would be a workable solution, but still weird.
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