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

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

#231

Post by dalke »

xyproto wrote: post #78
hvidgaard wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the surefire way to incorporate complexities from 2 different systems into 1.

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.

It's not a big advantage. EBCDIC, for example, didn't do that, and programmers managed just fine without it.

Also, why are you doing that check? Is it to see if something is lowercase? If so, your check will get the wrong answer for lowercase letters like å.

Unicode does have a way to check if something is uppercase/lowercase, when that distinction exists. This is in UnicodeData.txt.

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

#233

Post by etatoby »

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.

A text file, a webpage, or a database table can only contain textual data in a given encoding.

That's because every byte stored in the file, for example byte number 188, either means "¼" (as it does in ISO/IEC 8859-1, aka. Latin-1 or ANSI), or it means "ỳ" (as in ISO/IEC 8859-14) or "ｼ" (in JIS X 0201, one of the many Japanese encodings that were devised over the years.)

How do you know which encoding a certain file uses? In general YOU CAN'T and this was the source of many problems and "solutions" which caused even more problems over the years.

Well then, how did you mix symbols from different alphabets, say in a dictionary or in a post that talks about them, like this very post? YOU COULDN'T, short of doing ugly hacks and other subterfuges, like using GIFs for all foreign characters.

Unicode gave a distinct number (or "codepoint") to every character and symbol known to man (within reasonable limits) and this allowed a lot of things that we take for granted nowadays, including this very post, were I just copied and pasted various symbols from their Wikipedia pages and just expect it to work.

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

#234

Post by dalke »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #60

TIL that the SI units all have Unicode symbols. http://www.marathon-studios.com/unicode/categories/So/Other_... If people actually used these, it would make searching text for formulae much easier. Wikipedia editors and academic publishers, please note. Also, there's no Unicode for screwdriver. Perhaps iFixit would like to campaign for that? Congratulations on getting the power symbols in! When @edent writes "Will up…

I didn't see special Unicode symbols for the SI units in the link you gave or in a more general search. I found no match for "ampere" which is the SI base unit for electric current, or for "candela", used for luminous intensity.

BTW, just because a character exist doesn't mean it's the best choice for ordinary use. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85#Symbol_for_.C3.A5ngstr.... points out:

> Unicode also has encoded U+212B Å ANGSTROM SIGN. However, that is canonically equivalent to the ordinary letter Å. The duplicate encoding at U+212B is due to round-trip mapping compatibility with an East-Asian character encoding, but is otherwise not to be used.

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

#235

Post by gkya »

agumonkey wrote: post #227

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 ?) ?

That's what happens when you put good things at the hands of WWW.

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

#236

Post by lsaferite »

onion2k wrote: post #104
prima-facie wrote: post #99

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…

Doesn't Chinese have over 100k characters all by itself though? http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/eng.htm

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

#237

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

Jaruzel wrote: post #131
igravious wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign...

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

#238

Post by acz »

tangus wrote: post #55

How did the Unicode Consortium turn around. I remember 10 years ago they were refusing to add standard media icons because >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. >This list has been round and round and round on this -- regular as clockwork, about once a year, the topic comes up again. And I see no indication that the UTC…

Let’s start working on "SVG over UTF" RFC, should we?

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

#239

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

And then we expand it again, like we did at the earlier 2000's.

UTF8 will support it by default, UTF16 will stay broken, UTF32 will break, but nobody uses the later.

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

#240

Post by lsaferite »

cJ0th wrote: post #212
amake wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%)

As a data point, my laptop shows every emoji through Unicode 8.0 just fine.
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