I always wondered what was wrong with the glyph "ON" to denote on.
It makes it harder to find the "OFF" button when it's marked "ON"
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
81–90 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#82The 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.
It's really cool than these things can happen. Still, I can't help but feel like, in a couple of centuries, Unicode is gonna be a goddamn mess.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#83Earlier 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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
On Android N with Chrome 51
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I didn't dispute that. I just state that trying to remain compatible for the sake of being compatible is a great way to design a convuluted and difficult to understand standard.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#85The 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.
What's the IBM group symbol? I can't find the words IBM in [1].
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#86But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
> Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence
"To start the device, press the ⏻ button on the device face"
There, used in a sentence.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
The spade symbol[0] is codepoint 9824, the acknowledge control picture[1] (␆) is codepoint 9222. They shouldn't be using the same glyph.
[0] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2406/index.htm
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#88Earlier 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…
Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...
That sounds more like a problem of your terminal.
The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters.
See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380
So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full width or half width characters: https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph I have ever seen.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#90I always wondered what was wrong with the glyph "ON" to denote on.
It makes it harder to find the "OFF" button when it's marked "ON"
Use the glyph "OFF" for off.
Seriously, equipment has been marked ON and OFF for a hundred years. Is there any evidence anyone was confused with this more than with O and | ?