I first thought they are the ones responsible for this 'character':
﷽ 65021 ﷽ FDFD ARABIC LIGATURE BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHEEM
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
141–150 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#142Truly 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...?
Electrical symbols in general don't do so well when scaled down to the size of text. Plus, it is very uncommon to encounter the electrical gate symbols inline with text - usually the symbols are sitting in a separate circuit diagram.
Nevertheless, Unicode does have all of the logical symbols from mathematics, which are pretty commonly understood:
∧∨¬⊕Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, humans, just like any other living organism, deal with entropy quite well - they dump it onto others. :-)
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#144From 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/
For the same reason that they also include symbols for many obsolete (dead) languages and writing systems, as well as (per a comment above) a character used by the 1959 IBM 1401 computer (https://github.com/shirriff/groupmark). The need to be able to discuss a certain technology in writing does not disappear just because it is out of general use.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph I have ever seen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#/media/Fi... Biang from Biang biang noodles is also fairly complex (though not supported by Unicode)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Taito_1....
"appearance of a dragon in flight"
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#146As the story mentions regarding the off symbol (a circle), there are many visually identical code points that have different semantic meanings. But in this case, they added an additional semantic meaning to an existing code point. So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic meaning? Both? It depends? Something else? I've tried to decipher that on my own and only learned that the answer t…
> So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image?
Look it's pretty simple, every code point represents a semantic meaning, except for:
1. those characters who also encode the width of their visual image (U+FF00..FFEF)
2. the one that means 'unknown' (U+FFFD)
3. those characters that change their visual representation depending on their position in the word (U+FB50..U+FDFF,U+FE70..U+FEFF)
4. those that change the visual image of another code point (U+FE00..U+FE0F)
5. those characters that have a visual image as their semantic meaning (too many to list)
6. those that are designated to have no semantic meaning at all (U+FDD0..U+FDEF)
7. those that have a meaning only in pairs (U+D800..U+DFFF)
8. miscellaneous
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#147Earlier 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 | ?
Actually, my mind keeps jumping to O representing a completed circuit while | means a broken one, so I agree with you.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#148Earlier 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.
Emojis and hieroglyphs aside, 16bit was not enough for CJK characters. It's a real world problem---a character set that can't spell people's name or location can't be universally adopted.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#149From 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/
They have symbols for languages that _have_been_ obsolete for centuries, if not millennia.
Also, if popular, these kinds of things tend to outlive their technology. For prime examples, look at http://graphemica.com/, http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AA, http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AB, and http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AC (to be fair, I think that is overdoing it)
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#150Earlier 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…
> Remember that before emoji standardization various cell phone manufacturers (particularly in Japan if I remember correctly) started using codepoints for whatever they pleased.
Things were way worse than that: to add emoji to text, NTT DoCoMo used private-use codepoints, AU used embedded image tags and Softbank wrapped emoji codes in SI/SO escape sequences.