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

Post by jshevek » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #263

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.

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-... )

Post by dalke » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

msbarnett wrote: post #321

dalke wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EBCDIC had many problems, agreed. One is the non-contiguous range. Another is the many variants ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC_code_pages lists 11, x2 for the Euro Update). But how serious is the problem? How many times do you need to test if a given character is one of the 26 allowed letters of the English alphabet, and where you implement it by testing it against the range? Typically you write it as "islowe…

I mean, if you really want to get into it, it was a huge pain in the ass at a time when paying the cost of a call to islower_english was much more expensive than a hardware less-than instruction. We've broadly moved beyond that, but there's still value in grouping sets together in a way that makes certain kinds of frequent tests less computationally expensive than they would be if codepoints were randomly distributed…

Post by ximeng » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #293

ximeng wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All right, I spent some time trying to find the requirement. I did not find it, but my tentative conclusion is that it does not apply to chinese characters. FROM MEMORY, a while back there was an article on HN complaining that emoji seemed to magically bypass the requirements other characters needed to meet for inclusion in unicode, and that in fact they were commonly in violation. The taco symbol was called out as a…

Post by ximeng » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #305

barkingcat wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #305

barkingcat wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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