I hope that ligatures will be more popularized than using characters like "½", because it is very difficult to find them in text with standard ASCII characters, i.e. in Firefox by typing 1/2 in quick find (ctrl+f).
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
151–160 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#152From 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/
I found the proposal with the new symbols here: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15238-n4671.pdf
They were proposed by Japan, and intended for TV electronic program guide. If it makes you happier, one of the symbols is for 8K.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#153Legitimate 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.
True but I think that is also problematic.
The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important.
For instance, I often get e-mails with characters that can't be displayed because my standard fonts (on linux) don't have them. The "missing unicode symbol" icon is the new "picture not found" icon[0] In fact, it is even worse as there is no alt attribute that delineates what I am supposed to see.
[0] Remember this one? https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/425274582581264384/X3QX...
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#154Earlier 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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…
Funny how the OS won't even try some of them...
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#155Earlier 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
Why is it easier to infer that 'O' means off than 'OFF' for a person who does not know any English?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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.
It can still display a box.
> 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 question is implementation of what. I think that it is not an onerous requirement from applications that need to display emojis or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their OS could provide this service for them just as it allows them the use of fonts.
> 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.
That is a good point, one of which I was not aware, but I still don't think it justifies standardization of Chinese characters, emojis, and ancient Greek musical notation by the same standards body.
> Sure, but the different letter types carry crucial meaning in math formulas.
The use of italics in text may also carry crucial meaning. But if a textual representation as sup is supported, I don't see why the specialized rendering should be supported, too, but for math and not plain text.
> 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.
I agree, but I think that that semantic information is preserved when writing N or NN instead of 𝑵 or ℕ. Considering that Unicode isn't enough to write most mathematical formulas convenient forms anyway and requires a specialized renderer anyway, I don't see the reason for this extra effort.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#157At 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…
Basic Multilingual Plane?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's also precedent. Continental Europe standardized on "STOP" on stop signs back in the 70's, even though no continental language has "stop" in it.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#159Earlier 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.)
> And emoji are a totally separate story. Recent article on the Unicode/emoji debate: https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/inside-emojigeddon-th...
Unicode 9.0 adds 7500 characters, 72 of which are emoji, so I think the "Emojigeddon" is a bit exaggerated.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#160Where 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.
I always thought that phonetic spelling had a point.
"Until it's full" reminds me of departments that feel they must spend their entire budget.