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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

#301

Post by pron »

Tyr42 wrote: post #288
pron wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What happens if you want to use two different extended text code points in one blog post?

There are no codepoints if it's not text. How do you use codepoints for embedding a video or a picture on your blog? You don't! But, if you want to treat something as if it were text, then I suggested doing something similar to an XML namespace: "the next segment is hieroglyphics, you can get their glyphs from here, and these are their indices...". That "extended text" is still not text, and it still doesn't use any Unicode codepoints, but it can work according to similar principles.

> Do you think it'd be more efficient to have to support 6 different standards than one?

Then why don't we let the Unicode Consortium take over standardizing video or audio? If something isn't text, why is it standardized by a text standardization body?

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

#302

Post by cJ0th »

amake wrote: post #279
cJ0th wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

to make sure that even the most idiosyncratic choice of characters can be displayed everywhere according to the intention of the person who picked them.

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

#303

Post by nkrisc »

kens wrote: post #110
shakethemonkey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Until Unicode has a half-star character, it won't even be able to encode the average newspaper.

Somebody should propose the half star (used in star ratings) to Unicode. Seriously.

What if my products are rated in smiley-faces?

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

#304

Post by Semiapies »

acdha wrote: post #291
Semiapies wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're tossing that assertion around without supporting it – what commonly used characters are not in Unicode? How many people use them? Are they not in Unicode because nobody cares or because there is a lack of someone authoritative helping codify the list or contentious disagreements about some aspects of that work?

Seriously, you're able to Google up those other links, but you somehow can't find the (non-exhaustive) Unsupported Scripts list or the Proposed New Scripts pages on the Unicode site? And, without knowing the situation for any of them, you're going to throw out excuses for why the absences don't matter?

These aren't characters, but entire scripts that are not part of the standard. Nor are major scripts like kanji complete.

But, hey. Power button icon.

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

#305

Post by thaumasiotes »

barkingcat wrote: post #298
thaumasiotes wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was whether it can meet the Unicode inclusion requirements, not whether it's common.

Well, even if it doesn't meet unicode inclusion requirements, it is necessary for printing in one of the largest markets in the world. Without that character in unicode, Chinese display systems and printers probably won't use unicode at all (and before unicode they used some standard of their own) - meaning the question is whether unicode wants to be relevant or not, not whether the inclusion requirements fit.

Again, it's not a character that appears in text. This:

> Without that character in unicode, Chinese display systems and printers probably won't use unicode at all

is baseless. In its current uses, it doesn't appear on display systems and when printed it is almost always designed as an image, not printed as part of a font. Compare: http://pic10.nipic.com/20100928/5211371_231333032314_2.jpg

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

#307

Post by msbarnett »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #300
barkingcat wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That character is extremely common. It's not just a one off wedding celebration thing. Also used in new year celebrations. Basically every single year you'd see tons of these printed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Happiness_(calligraphy) It's a pun actually, double happiness.

Every year you see tons of 福倒 printed too (福, but upside down). That has yet to receive a code point.

You're not wrong, but I don't know if it's a great example.

CJK characters are, broadly, an example of the Unicode Consortium trying to be way too reductive about what they'd accept, leading to a lot of bad decisions like Han Unification, which caused a lot of damage and which the Consortium has generally now backed away from and recognized as a bad idea.

So, yes, if you look closely at CJK character sets in Unicode, you can find a lot of decision making that appears to contradict decision making elsewhere in the standard. This is in large part because the decisions they made wrt CJK characters turned out to be largely wrong, and they've since changed their approach.

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

#308

Post by xigency »

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.

This article has some examples - https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...

There is also some discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162

In this instance, someone is complaining that they cannot type their name on a computer.

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

#309

Post by msbarnett »

ivl wrote: post #250
TorKlingberg wrote: post #159

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.

Your options are:

1) everybody uses them on their phones, they're in Unicode, consistent and compatible between devices and messaging programs. In the far flung future, researchers will be able to study their linguistic role in communication, confident in understanding what the characters were.

2) everybody uses them on their phones, they're proprietary fonts and codepoints (in the Unicode private use area if you're luck, just random data if you're not), there's no consistency between phone models, manufacturers, or cell networks. Future researchers can pound sand.

We were at #2 pre-Unicode. It was a goddamn mess, especially in Japan. Lord knows why anyone would prefer it. There's no value in being a snob about what kinds of incredibly frequently used characters we think are Worthy of inclusion, imo.

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

#310

Post by yk »

leni536 wrote: post #63
yk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer illustrates my point perfectly, first the lack of a reasonable fall back mechanism. Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point ( and theoretically add that character to a open font). A default font would just ship with every OS out there, and suddenly there would be a working fall back. Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file co…

> The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/ . If you really wanted you can make them into a font No, last time I checked you are not legally allowed to do that.

I checked your link, then I proceeded to the terms of service and IANAL there they claim that all 'unicode software' is basically MIT licensed. (Please check with a lawyer before you conclude that word is MIT licensed.)
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