Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

unicodepowersymbol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 429 posts

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

#131

Post by Jaruzel »

igravious wrote: post #129
kens wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

How are traffic signs not in "running text" in books about the rules of the road and such like?

I'm not sure about the 'running text' thing, but in my view Traffic Signs are not globally universal (yet), so you'd have to have regional variants which is impractical.

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

#132

Post by andyjohnson0 »

kens wrote: post #101
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.)

> And emoji are a totally separate story.

Recent article on the Unicode/emoji debate:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/inside-emojigeddon-th...

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

#135

Post by lmm »

onion2k wrote: post #109
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.

It absolutely would be. But it should not be part of a plain text format.

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

#136

Post by edent »

bambax wrote: post #91
xyproto wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? Couldn't Unicode have pointers or links, where a codepoint "exists" with no content and only links to another? (I don't know anything about Unicode, so maybe it already has that.)

Semantically, yes. In the code tables you'll see that that "opposite" symbols have links to each other.

Programatically, it is much easier to say "does a character lie between 0x12 and 0xBC" than to create a function like `isSymbolForTrafficInEurope()`

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

#137

Post by systemfreund »

From the Unicode 9.0.0 announcement [0]:

> Important symbol additions include:

> 19 symbols for the new 4K TV standard

I am wondering, why did they add symbols for a standard which will become obsolete eventually?

[0]: http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/

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

#139

Post by johncolanduoni »

pron wrote: post #120
johncolanduoni wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> 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.

So you think instituting a system based on links not rotting would better preserve meaning? Not to mention that:

* Every text renderer that doesn't support your codepoint now displays a full URL, instead of a box, making text using these emojis very difficult to read.

* Instead of making implementation easy by requiring nothing new of text shaping libraries, they now have to be able to both connect to the internet and tie into a file cache.

The supplementary space was already there when we got to emojis, and UTF-8 and UTF-16 already had to deal with SMP codepoints for some of the less common CJK characters. Not everything above 0xFFFF is "weird" non-human language stuff. If the choice was "stick with UCS-2 and be totally fine language wise, or add more bits just for emojis and pictograms" I'd probably agree with you. If you think that's what happened, your timeline for this process is way off.

> So is rendering text in Arial vs. Comic Sans, but they haven't made separate codepoints for those.

Sure, but the different letter types carry crucial meaning in math formulas. "sup" in upright letters is the math operator supremum, "sup" in math italics is s * u * p. This kind of thing applies to every one of the mathematical letter variants.

> 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.

You're zooming way out on this one. Math symbols have a lot more in common with letters and "normal" symbols than "all specialized usage of human-readable data". Remember that when Unicode added the math symbols, things like MathJax were simply impossible. Being able to write at least some formulas, which consist of letters and symbols, without losing tons of semantic information seems like exactly the kind of thing character encodings should do.

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

#140

Post by qbrass »

function_seven wrote: post #114
WalterBright wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol

You don't have to be able to read the word ON to recognize it as a symbol. "Circle next to zigzag-thing" is as good as circle with line sticking out of it.
Post reply on HN