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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

#221

Post by pron »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #186
pron wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unicode has added 1791 emojis[1]. Note that it has used significantly fewer codepoints than this for emojis, because some (e.g. flags) are done via a small number of combining marks (flags use 26 code points for letters in country codes). They've been slowing down the rate of additional emojis since they started doing this. Do you really think they'll accelerate at some point and use up the almost 1 million unassigne…

I'm not afraid of running out of codepoints. I just think it is misguided that non-text is standardized as text. It just doesn't make sense. I don't know how people will communicate 50 years from now, but I think it's funny that even then, text strings would still need to support all those vegetables and hand gestures. Written text is pretty much eternal; emojis and pictograms? I doubt it. It doesn't make sense for them to get a similar treatment.

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

#222

Post by pron »

spacehunt wrote: post #165
pron wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still 16 bits would not be enough, it's only 65536 different code pages, less than half of what is currently in Unicode. But that's only because Unicode has significantly ventured well beyond what we consider to be text. The BMP is enough to represent all text (including math).

The are characters outside of the BMP that are in daily use in my native tongue (Cantonese).

Right, those should definitely be a part of Unicode. That's no excuse for emojis.

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

#223

Post by pron »

hvidgaard wrote: post #194
pron wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They should all be standardized under separate standards. You can call them "extended text", if you like. Mathematical notation isn't really supported by Unicode, either (just mathematical symbols), and that's fine. Math should have its own standard, and so should hieroglyphs, emojis, and musical notation.

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

#224

Post by jessriedel »

ygra wrote: post #125
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

Heck, Unicode is a mess already. But that's mostly because (a) language and scripts are messy, and (b) the original aim was to unify and encompass all existing character sets, and some of those were messy as well. While there was considerable uproar over Emoji and there still often is over yet another fifteen symbols that everyone thinks no one would ever need or use, the bulk of the Unicode character set is still sc…

> Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds.

Could you give an example? I don't know anything about this stuff.

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

#225

Post by Pxtl »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #151

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).

I'm always wierded out by that, because it implies we should support the full gamut of math - superscripted/subscripted text, large fractions, the text above and below the epsilon in discrete sums, etc.

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

#226

Post by cbd1984 »

yk wrote: post #51
detaro wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you want to know what they can look like, the blogpost has images, an embedded webfont and links to the reference font for the new symbols. And AFAIK providing reference images that are freely usable is required for all new symbol proposals.

It does not work on Firefox with noScript. (And as a matter of fact, prohibiting random blog posts from rendering unicode, executing complex numerical calculations on my graphics card or delivering exploits is kind of the purpose of noScript...)

NoScript does not prevent pages from "rendering Unicode", whatever that's supposed to mean. I use it myself, and the only thing it does is selectively block Javascript.

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

#227

Post by agumonkey »

I'm a bit confused about Unicode. It was a repository of linguistic symbols, not raw symbols. More and more it looks like wingdings. Isn't this putting burden on font support and Text processing (what's the lexicographic order of such symbols, using the abstract name ?) ?

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

#228

Post by agumonkey »

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.

This is the role of digits I believe.

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

#229

Post by cbd1984 »

pron wrote: post #22
yk wrote: post #17

I already ranted about unicode earlier today, my main argument is, that unicode is what happens if everybody qualified thinks: "That's a great idea, of course you have to handle X and Y and Z and I just remember that I forgot to fill out several warranty cards." This blog post is a nice example, I have absolutely no idea how these new code points are supposed to look like, since I only spend an afternoon to implement…

I think that the BMP -- Basic Multilingual Plane or the first 16-bit of Unicode characters -- is pretty reasonable, and covers fairly well everything we may consider as text (all alphabets in current use plus mathematical symbols). Anything beyond that, from emojis and pictograms to ancient Greek musical notation is pretty... weird. I think it would have made much more sense to have something like image tags: a speci…

That's nice, except the BMP doesn't encode all of Chinese, and it includes a number of weird control characters for compatibility with ASCII. Like Vertical Tab. Who uses Vertical Tab anymore?

The dream of a 16-bit Unicode washed up on the rocks of CJK scripts. It's dead and it isn't going to be revived. You can argue for a simpler standard, with fewer assigned codepoints, but the original BMP isn't it and was never going to be it.

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

#230

Post by dalke »

jessriedel wrote: post #224
ygra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, Unicode is a mess already. But that's mostly because (a) language and scripts are messy, and (b) the original aim was to unify and encompass all existing character sets, and some of those were messy as well. While there was considerable uproar over Emoji and there still often is over yet another fifteen symbols that everyone thinks no one would ever need or use, the bulk of the Unicode character set is still sc…

> Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds. Could you give an example? I don't know anything about this stuff.

Conversion between different character codes became much easier. (Å (U+00C5) is canonically the same as Å (U+212B) but the latter exist only for round-trip compatibility.)

Unicode defines normalization algorithms (is é its own character, or e with a modifier character?).

I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools.

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