I always wondered what was wrong with the glyph "ON" to denote on.
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
71–80 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#72was this a clever ploy from the awful-and-unusable-incident-management-system-as-a-service i have to use at my job whose logo is ⏻?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#73Earlier 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…
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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
They are also very small on my computer (Chrome on OS X 10.11.5, external non-'Retina' monitor), but they are vertically aligned instead of diagonal:
http://i.imgur.com/kKfLYgx.jpg
Interestingly in Safari the hieroglyph is shown (still small though), I wonder why Chrome can't find it?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#74TIL 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 up…
The SI ones are for use together with Chinese/Japanese/Korean to fit together with their square characters.
I don't see how using them for anything else would have any use. I never searched for units when searching for formulas
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doubling text files is a waste for the most part, but what makes it tolerable is compression. Still 16 bits would not be enough, it's only 65536 different code pages, less than half of what is currently in Unicode. 24 bit is sufficiently out of allignment with modern hardware and algorithms, so 32 bit it is for efficiency. That is now 4 times the size, and compression is now a requirement.
In any case, Utf8 has a place, and if you want easy manipulation and search, convert it to Utf32 - it's fixed width.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#76Cool.
I'll add these (and the IBM-related symbols @kens mentioned, which are specially appropriate) to https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font for the next release (this weekend, I think - still lots of Cyrillic cleanup to do in the develop branch).
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#77Earlier 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…
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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Being able to easily check if a letter is between 'a' and 'z' in code is an advantage. This is only possible if the codepoints are sequential.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#79Earlier 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…
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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
Imagine if ﷽ was sized to a monospace font.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#80Earlier 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…
> 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.
What does that have to do with Unicode adding anything? Are you really claiming that if we threw out Unicode like you recommend, and (if I'm understanding your point correctly) choose an encoding for the new version that looks nothing like ASCII the encoding mess would get better? I think continuing the migration of most transmission of text to UTF-8 and explicitly specifying encodings for everything that needs to stick with Latin-1, etc. is a better option, unless you propose codifying the new encoding in law to force adoption.