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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

#101

Post by kens »

tangus wrote: 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…

Unicode is supposed to include symbols that appear in "running text", not standalone icons. So no on traffic signs for instance. (There are exceptions for historical reasons. And emoji are a totally separate story.)

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

jhanschoo wrote: post #53
coddingtonbear wrote: post #42

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.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by akiselev »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82
kens wrote: post #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.

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.

What isn't a huge goddamn mess after several centuries? If there's one thing we humans don't deal with well, it's entropy.

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

#104

Post by onion2k »

prima-facie wrote: post #99

Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols? I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things like emoji, but having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste. What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?

having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste

A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full. Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time.

If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's up to the people who are members of the consortium to decide how they want to spend their energy?

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

#105

Post by function_seven »

prima-facie wrote: post #99

Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols? I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things like emoji, but having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste. What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?

These symbols are useful, no? There's plenty of room in Unicode for more symbols, no reason to be overly frugal with which glyphs are included.

> What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?

Then they get added as well.

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

#106

Post by nabla9 »

At some point, someone realizes that there is need to standardize fixed practical subset of Unicode that contains all essential symbols over the world so that all devices that comply with the standard can __actually__ interchange text in readable, printable and visually presentable form.

It's nice to have catalogue of symbols and tight encoding for them, but full support of Unicode encoding has very little to do with support for Unicode in an application.

🇦 🇧 🇨 🇩 🇪 🇫 🇬 🇭 🇮 🇯 🇰 🇱 🇲 🇳 🇴 🇵 🇶 🇷 🇸 🇹 🇺 🇻 🇼 🇽 🇾 🇿.

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

#107

Post by ktsmith »

kristianp wrote: post #85
kens wrote: post #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.

What's the IBM group symbol? I can't find the words IBM in [1]. [1] http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2B00.pdf

You can find it here where it says it's in Stage 6 which I would imagine why it's not in the current chart: http://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html

2BD2 GROUP MARK 2015-May-05 Accepted 2016-May-29 Stage 6

The bitcoin symbol is in there too.

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

#108

Post by Asooka »

iopq wrote: post #69
coddingtonbear wrote: post #42

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.

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.

You mean like Han unification?

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

#109

Post by onion2k »

Animats wrote: post #40

But 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.

Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.

A standard clip art library that covers universally understood symbols sounds like something that would be very useful.

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

#110

Post by kens »

shakethemonkey wrote: post #62
tangus wrote: 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.

Somebody should propose the half star (used in star ratings) to Unicode. Seriously.
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