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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

#271

Post by wodenokoto »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #265
wodenokoto wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is true for lots of characters (so I guess I was being a little hyperbolic when I said "all"), and you cannot rely on choosing the correct code points in order to have a text display Japanese or Chinese. You need to tell your rendering program (often through choice of font) if things are to be rendered with Japanese or Chinese forms.

I wouldn't know how to show you examples here, as 直 will 直 display the same since they have the same code point, but different number of strokes in japabese and chinese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

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

#272

Post by legulere »

legulere wrote: post #88
School-Cotton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so is that why emojis don't display correctly in vim? They spill out of the character's bounding box...

That sounds more like a problem of your terminal. The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters. See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full…

Apparently emoji representations are defined to be wide by unicode 9 now: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr11/tr11-31.html#Modificatio...

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

#273

Post by bjourne »

gwbas1c wrote: post #248
acz wrote: post #238

Earlier 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…

What about the oddest oddballs whose "symbols" are animations http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/tww.gif? They are used a lot on reddit sometimes even with sound.

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

#274

Post by ximeng »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #256
wmil wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's true that 囍 never occurs in running text - it's used in company names which would be used in text. It would be odd not to have an encoding for such a common character.

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

#275

Post by WorldMaker »

EdiX wrote: post #134

And yet still no klingon...

I've been saying for a while now that the proposed conlang block (for Klingon, Tolkien's Elvish scripts, et al) was shut down prior to expanding into the Astral Plane and it's past time to revisit that proposal seeking a good spot in the Astral Plane. Similar academic criteria used for encoding deceased and historic languages can be applied to conlang proposals.

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

#276

Post by footpath »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #265
wodenokoto wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is true to some extent. While 青 and 靑 have different codepoints, there are plenty of characters of the same codepoint that are rendered differently depends on the language specificed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...

Han characters that are traditionally viewed as variants of one another, or that are simplified from more complex logograms (such as 龜, which was simplified into 亀 in Japan and 龟 in mainland China) tend to have different codepoints, but the stylistically different ones usually belong to the same codepoint.

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

#277

Post by rbanffy »

rbanffy wrote: post #161
kens wrote: 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.

Just added the group mark (and these power symbols) to https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font/tree/develop . It was fun. Thanks for giving me an excuse. http://imgur.com/Sx0lkM8

https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font/releases/tag/v1.2.15

A bit early.

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

#278

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

agumonkey wrote: post #258
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> may I'd say that & is a symbol that represent a grammar connective

Then what about §? or $? Or %? The list is endless.

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

#279

Post by amake »

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%)

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

Again, meaningless. Why should there have to be a common fallback font?

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

#280

Post by Semiapies »

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 ?) ?

Last I checked, Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet. On the other hand, approving emoji and random icons delights Westerners.
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