Where does adding new Unicode symbols stop?
When there are no more to add or the symbol space is full. Until then, no reason to halt it as far as I'm concerned.
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
111–120 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#112But 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.
If I understand correctly, Unicode only provides the semantic meaning, not the actual rendering. The font provides information for how to render it. Am I right?
Yes, though they provide guidance on how they should look, and in most cases, there is only one font on the system that has a glyph for some of these more esoteric code points, and it usually provides a reasonable representation.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#113Legitimate 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?
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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 | ?
People who don't speak English?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...)
You prohibit pages from "rendering Unicode"? Why?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#116Earlier 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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
With DejaVu they are distinguishable enough:
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#117Truly 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
Unicode? Of course they are well defined generally.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#118Legitimate 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?
> useless symbols?
Just because they are useless to you doesn't mean they are useless to everyone.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#119But 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.
I hear you. If you want pictures then use a markup language. Unfortunately it is too late now. We finally had an almost universally supported character set, and then we ruined it with levitating men in business suits. Recent Unicode versions introduce far more technical challenges than they solve. For instance, now that code points can come with colour, there are conflicting requirements between the requested text colour and the intrinsic colour of a symbol.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation? In the same way it's useful to standardize letters in various alphabets without standardizing their screen representation. There is semantic content associated with each of these symbols that persists even if there is significant variation in h…
> In the same way it's useful to standardize letters in various alphabets without standardizing their screen representation.
I disagree. Say the name of a letter in any alphabet, and people will draw it in ways that are similar enough for automatic recognition. This is not true for pictograms and emojis.
> The alternative to Unicode not standardizing them was to have a repeat of the OEM font gold rush in the SMP.
I disagree. The alternative is a much simpler and faster standardization, of the kind I offered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958903 There is absolutely no need for a fixed codepoint for most of the non-BMP characters.
> If your goal is to be able to preserve some math formulas in a purely line based text format, preserving this aspect makes a big difference in readability.
So is rendering text in Arial vs. Comic Sans, but they haven't made separate codepoints for those.
Also, where this makes a lot of difference, would count as "specialized usage". I don't think it makes sense to have a single universal standard to standardize all specialized usage of human-readable data.