181–190 of 429 posts
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>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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Imagine if ﷽ was sized to a monospace font.
In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph I have ever seen.
And actually it is in the Arabic "name of God," thanks!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%B3%D9%85_%D8%A7%D9%...
I didn't know there's a whole ligature as a single code point U+FDFD available, thanks sscotth. The code point is also easy to remember.
(It, accidentally, also most probably represents the words first said by the Orlando shooter when calling 911, when the translation in the transcription is compared.)
Is this the biggest glyph in Unicode?
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…
And then what? It's already 11% full.
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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.
I didn't dispute that. I just state that trying to remain compatible for the sake of being compatible is a great way to design a convuluted and difficult to understand standard.
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.
> Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence "To start the device, press the ⏻ button on the device face" There, used in a sentence.
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> It can still display a box. If it knows about your new codepoint. Everyone using an implementation that doesn't yet support it is going to show the full URL. If history repeats itself, these implementations will be the majority for at least a decade. > 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.…
> That's what happens with sup (or other named operators). And that's what happens when scrubbing subscripts or binomial coefficients. When you want to represent math as text, you need to change your representation (add multiplication signs, forgo subscripts, use confusing parentheses etc.). This is still true with Unicode. The contribution of the non-BMP special math characters is quite minimal. > The crux of this i…
Suffice it to say this getting "out of control" and eating up the remaining space in our lifetimes, or our children's lifetimes would be pretty impressive. This means that the worst we have to fear is more boxes, assuming OSes don't keep up with their fallback fonts. Saying adding more symbols-designed-to-be-just-kind-of-placed-in-line-with-other-symbols-like-they-always-have-been is the first step towards MIDI and organization diagrams is like saying you're vegetarian because it's a slippery slope from eating meat to eating people.
Also note that unlike every other excess of the Unicode standard, these would require massive changes to the code that handles text. This means that if Unicode decided to do this, you wouldn't have to worry about negative effects because nobody would implement it.
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…
Basic Multilingual Plane?
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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.
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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?
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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.