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

unicodepowersymbol.com

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

#191

Post by coldtea »

hackuser wrote: post #13

As 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…

>As the story mentions regarding the off symbol (a circle), there are many visually identical code points that have different semantic meanings.

So? How is that different from any regular character in real life?

101 for example means the number 101, an introductory class in university, slang for "anything introductory" in general, etc.

And let's not get started on the meanings of letters, e.g. a and e.

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

#192

Post by acqq »

tlrobinson wrote: post #49
sthatipamala wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eyes in your emoticon are actually the letter 'ta' in Telugu, a regional Indian language.

ಠ_ಠ

Wow, the Japanese really spend a lot of time inventing these combinations: http://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-emoticons/

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

#193

Post by coldtea »

gpderetta wrote: post #187
kozak wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic Multilingual Plane?

Emoji are not in the BMP. Whether they are essential or not I'll leave it to you :)

Well, they're not essential either.

In fact up to less than 5 years ago, there weren't anywhere except in some phones (and mostly Japanese phones at that).

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

#194

Post by hvidgaard »

pron wrote: post #171
hvidgaard wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMP is mostly filled with symbols from logographic languages, and currently has around 100 free code points. 16 bits simply isn't enough for the scope of capturing all written language of the history.

But I don't think all written languages in history should have the same treatment when it comes to standardized data representation, or should all be standardized by the same body. It's OK to have alphabets no one has used for thousands of years other than specialized researchers standardized separately from Latin or Chinese alphabets.

But if you don't what would the point of a unified standard be? What should happen to glyphs that noone have used outside of research for 100 years? 1000 years?

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

#195

Post by dingo_bat »

Jaruzel wrote: post #124
mappu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://materialdesignicons.com/ makes a font available with a reasonably large selection of brand and functionality icons, using unicode private ranges (also svg or whatever). I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode.

> I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode. Seconded, brands come and go, as do their logos, many large corporations have gone through several logo changes. Pan-Am is the main one that springs to mind (or it's because I've just re-watched Blade Runner AGAIN...)

>several logo changes

So just change the font you use to render Unicode. The Unicode itself can remain the same.

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

#196

Post by Ruud-v-A »

slapresta wrote: post #164
Ruud-v-A wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

This is about icon fonts and font rendering and has nothing to do with Unicode. Code points don't have colour; there's no colour requirements anywhere in the spec. Your fonts don't have to support the entirety of Unicode. That's why we have font stacks and fallbacks.

U+1F499 BLUE HEART U+1F49A GREEN HEART U+1F49B YELLOW HEART U+1F49C PURPLE HEART U+1F53D DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE U+1F536 LARGE ORANGE DIAMOND U+1F537 LARGE BLUE DIAMOND ...

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

#197

Post by tragomaskhalos »

EdiX wrote: post #146
hackuser wrote: post #13

As 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…

Why does this list remind me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole... ? :)

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

#198

Post by acqq »

Can anybody see how the characters look like? Wouldn't it be good to have the pictures of all 4 and half? Some link?

I see there was a proposal here in PDF:

https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode/raw/master/power_symbol_...

But there's a lot of glyphs there. What was accepted then? If the circle was reused, what are the remaining four?

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

#199

Post by coldtea »

Bromskloss wrote: post #183
onion2k wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. And then what? It's already 11% full.

So? In this 11% it already covers almost all written languages in use and tons of dead ones. It also has lots of classic symbols, from math, book ornaments, standard typographic stuff (left arrow, etc.).

So all the basics are covered.

We could cover the rest 89% with variations of the turd emoticon and we'll still be perfectly fine.

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

#200

Post by namaemuta »

kens wrote: post #110
shakethemonkey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Multiply your rating system by 2 and you won't need half stars :)
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