Hope pause/play/rewind etc come next: http://fontawesome.io/icons/#video-player
You mean 0x23E9 to 0x23FA, just before these new power symbols? I only noticed them because the unicode power symbol site has an image of what comes before their symbols.
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
261–270 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#262I'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?
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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#263The 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.
You don't need to be part of a big company, but it certainly helps. Especially if you want to stop a pentathalon or rifle character.
(Top result: http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/rifle-emoji-dropped-unicode-...)
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s start working on "SVG over UTF" RFC, should we?
Honestly, I think "SVG over UTF" makes a lot more sense. It's impossible to make a character set that supports every character known to man, because that just adds undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up. So why don't we pick a very good set: perhaps every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years? Then, for the oddball symbols that someone wants to mix in text, there can be some kin…
But if the shape of embedded in the text, font choice becomes meaningless.
> undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up.
The effort to update the font files every few years? Unless you insist on supporting a new Unicode version the second it comes out, I don't see the big effort here? Of course there is effort for font makers, but this is quite centralised.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
"So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic meaning? Both? It depends? Something else?" Well the answer is clear: each code point represents one visual image, to which is associated one or more meanings.
Try looking up han-unification and its justification and you'll see the exact opposite approach to encoding characters into unicode. For CJK characters, they unified all semantically similar han-characters, even when they have visual forms that are quite different between Japanese, Chinese and Korean. If you want to write Japanese and Chinese in the same document, you need to mark up the section to tell the system th…
> For CJK characters, they unified all semantically similar han-characters, even when they have visual forms that are quite different between Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
This isn't true. 青 and 靑 are the same character written differently; they have their own codepoints. Ditto for a huge number of simplified Chinese characters; 语 is mainland Chinese and 語 is the same character in Japanese.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#266I'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?
Don't confuse 'intelligence' and how you communicate. Math texts are "emoji" fest with crude grammar but they represent subtle abstractions.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese
English combines with top-down Chinese, and English combines with right-to-left Arabic, but top-down Chinese and right-to-left Arabic don't combine properly in the same document using Unicode -- the Arabic will be written bottom-up instead of top-down when embedded in the top-down Chinese.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s start working on "SVG over UTF" RFC, should we?
Honestly, I think "SVG over UTF" makes a lot more sense. It's impossible to make a character set that supports every character known to man, because that just adds undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up. So why don't we pick a very good set: perhaps every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years? Then, for the oddball symbols that someone wants to mix in text, there can be some kin…
> This allows publishing textual information without requiring that every device maker updates their device to support a 1-off symbol.
The main purpose of Unicode is to encode the information. How the information is turned into its visual counterpart is outside the scope of unicode. For what it's worth this could be done by linking unicode code points to matching SVGs in a document. Wait, exactly that is already a W3C standard: https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/fonts.html
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#269Earlier 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.
Someone I know worked at a company that sells a content management system with version control. Bigcos use it to keep and update lots of marketing materials and manuals. Those responsible for product x or area y can see what's been added by others, and update their own versions, and record that.
In this way, new FAQs and other updates spread to all the markets easily.
It's vastly easier to do this stuff when all the documents use the same text encoding. Even if noone can read everything, the fact that everything uses the same encoding means that any pair of languages you can read are technically readable.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese English combines with top-down Chinese, and English combines with right-to-left Arabic, but top-down Chinese and right-to-left Arabic don't combine properly in the same document using Unicode -- the Arabic will be written bottom-up instead of top-down when embedded in the top-down Chinese.
Layout is indeed hard.
I meant something simpler, like: The word 'computer' in English is 计算者 [jì suàn zhě] in Chinese, Компьютер in Russian, and حاسوب in Arabic."
Try that without Unicode.
It's of course possible with TeX, and no doubt other solutions. Which is why I added "and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools".
(As a real-world use case, look at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" and see how he credits people using their full names, in their own written language.)