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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

#251

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 ?) ?

The difference between an icon and a letter is small and unclear. & is a symbol but was considered a letter as an example. Chinese characters are words etc.

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

#252
post #66

The success of the unicodepowersymbol proposal inspired me to suggest a couple characters to Unicode (the Bitcoin sign and IBM's group mark from 1960s mainframes, which were accepted). The point is that Unicode really is open to proposals from random people; you don't need to part of a big company to influence Unicode.

Agreed.

Although I had never worked with the Unicode Consortium, I [submitted a proposal][1] for an international symbol for an observer and it was eventually accepted.

[1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/01/international-symbo...

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

#253
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the story for emoji?

What about a text, or an article? Books aren't the only source of running text.

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

#254
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the story for emoji?

Emoji are widely used in text such as instant messages and forum posts.

They are mostly in Unicode for use in SMS, but there are plenty of use cases in other forms of text.

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

#255
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the story for emoji?

Books aren't the only form of running text. Emoji are quite common in some forms of textual communication.

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

#256
post #241

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 ?) ?

They want every symbol used in a document to have a unique encoding, so that you can change fonts without losing meaning. Fonts like wingdings are a horrible hack. The idea is one (complex) encoding that will represent the info until the end of time. It creates a lot of trouble, but it's still a good idea.

Technically, glyphs are supposed to meet some standards, like being shown in use in running text, before they can be added to unicode. It's not supposed to be a repository of every picture anyone ever dreamed up.

The standards are not applied consistently. Even leaving emoji out of it, the chinese "character" 囍 never occurs in running text, but there it is in unicode.

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

#257

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 ?) ?

We may think that we are enlightened beings but the fact is that pictures comprise a lot of how we communicate now and in the past. Are emojis that different from hieroglyphics?

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

#258

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 ?) ?

The difference between an icon and a letter is small and unclear. & is a symbol but was considered a letter as an example. Chinese characters are words etc.

Good point. Letters.. punctuation.. symbol .. the lines are blurry. If I may I'd say that & is a symbol that represent a grammar connective. Which is a generic abstraction and won't cause explosion like having symbols for every word out there.

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

#259
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode 9.0 adds 7500 characters, 72 of which are emoji, so I think the "Emojigeddon" is a bit exaggerated.

Sounds like 72 too many if you ask me. In all seriousness, I'm not sure emoji's really belong in text encoding. Even though it's more convenient, based on where they're most frequently used I don't think they need to be universal.

The "universal" in Unicode means that it aspires to include all symbols used in any form of text; not that it should only include symbols that are used in all forms of text.

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

#260

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 ?) ?

Go read http://unicode.org/standard/principles.html. The committee follows its principles intelligently.

In this case, the codepoints were added in part because the proposers could show many printed works (user manuals, I guess) that included sentences such as "to turn the foobar on, press the ■ button", which shows that the glyph between "the" and "button" is in some way like the surrounding glyphs. Chessmen were added for similar reasons, even though very few people actually read either user manuals or chess literature.

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