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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

#211

Post by amake »

pron wrote: post #65
skybrian wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

> it requires an O(n) algorithm to jump to a specific character

If you are trying to index into a string by "character" you are almost certainly already doing it wrong. Meaningful indexing almost always has to be by grapheme cluster. See Swift's string API as a great example of this done right.

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

#212

Post by cJ0th »

amake wrote: post #210
cJ0th wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attribut…

> the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important That is a meaningless requirement. The symbols I use on a daily basis already don't exist in a single font. Operating systems handle font fallback just fine.

Fair enough but there is no common fallback font that is used by all systems (win, osx, linux, android ...) as a default.

Take this page for example: http://emojipedia.org/faq/ Only a fraction of the emojis is displayed on my laptop. (maybe 20%)

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

#213

Post by EdiX »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #197
EdiX wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... ? :)

Because Unicode is the Celestial Consortium of Benevolent Encoding.

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

#217

Post by ape4 »

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.

Only the star with the left side filled in. And an outline on the right.

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

#218

Post by xg15 »

jomamaxx wrote: post #206
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…

"many visually identical code points" The emoji code points can be represented differently on different systems given their meaning. So it makes sense to have different emojis for different 'meanings'. The 'moon' switch here does no mean 'moon' - it means 'standby' or whatever. It may look noticeably different on different systems. Think from a design perspective: you have 5 emojis to represent 'clouds, sky, earth' e…

But that doesn't explain the inconsistency in the current case.

So if a system wants to render "on" differently than "straight vertical line", that's possible.

However, if "off" should be rendered differently than "circle", that's not possible. (Or only possible with out-of-band information or modifier characters which would still have to be defined)

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

#219

Post by j4_james »

heinrich5991 wrote: post #77
the8472 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…

FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png .

That looks like your browser is somehow misinterpreting the character set of the page. What you're seeing appears to be something like code page 437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437) rather than unicode.

What browser/os are you using? Is it possible you're going through a proxy that is altering the HTTP headers?

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