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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

#281

Post by Tyr42 »

dalke wrote: post #270
vorg wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

Do you know when you would use 计算着 over 电脑[dian nao]? 计算着 I guess more literally translates to "one who computes", whereas 电脑 translates to "electric brain" which is a way more fun image, but I have no idea how the usage varies.

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

#282

Post by macspoofing »

Semiapies wrote: post #280
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.

>Last I checked, Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet

Because the Unicode standards body doesn't want them in, or because those scripts don't have champions pushing for their inclusion?

>On the other hand, approving emoji and random icons delights Westerners.

Westerners? Notwithstanding the fact that emoji icons came from Japan, I'm fairly certain emotive icons are popular globally.

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

#283

Post by acdha »

Semiapies wrote: post #280
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.

When was the last time you checked? See e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/ and especially http://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html – it's not everything in human history but what's left out are increasingly obscure.

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

#284

Post by Semiapies »

macspoofing wrote: post #282
Semiapies wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Last I checked, Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet Because the Unicode standards body doesn't want them in, or because those scripts don't have champions pushing for their inclusion? >On the other hand, approving emoji and random icons delights Westerners. Westerners? Notwithstanding the fact that emoji icons came from Japan, I'm fairly certain emotive ico…

Well, we know emoji has at least one champion, here.

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

#285

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

vorg wrote: post #267
dalke wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

Isn't that not not a problem with Unicode, but the text rendering engine? Or is this indeed a spec bug?

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

#286

Post by dalke »

Tyr42 wrote: post #281
dalke wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Do you know when you would use 计算着 over 电脑[dian nao]? 计算着 I guess more literally translates to "one who computes", whereas 电脑 translates to "electric brain" which is a way more fun image, but I have no idea how the usage varies.

No clue. I did a copy and paste.

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

#288

Post by Tyr42 »

pron wrote: post #223
hvidgaard wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if you want to use two different extended text code points in one blog post? How would they interact? How do they avoid assigning the same codepoint to different symbols. How would browsers support this? What's the actual plan, not just a handwave? Do you think it'd be more efficient to have to support 6 different standards than one?

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

#289

Post by Semiapies »

acdha wrote: post #283
Semiapies wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When was the last time you checked? See e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/ and especially http://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html – it's not everything in human history but what's left out are increasingly obscure.

You don't have to point to human history, though that's a good source of missing scripts. Waving off scripts actually in use as "increasingly obscure", while cheering Unicode throwing in any icon random geeks pitch to them, misses the purpose of Unicode.

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

#290

Post by agumonkey »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #278
agumonkey wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're talking about potential concatenation or are these used (never seen them). If the former then I think it's a bit outside the problem scope.
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