Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

unicodepowersymbol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 429 posts

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

#341

Post by nitrogen »

kens wrote: post #314
copperx wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the story for emoji?

Emoji were added to Unicode for compatibility with various mobile phones, so they would have a standard encoding. That's how Unicode ended up with the poop emoji for example - they didn't sit around thinking "what we really need is...". Since people really, really want more emoji, Unicode is sort of stuck constantly adding more. If you want to propose new emoji, the rules are at http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection…

IIRC HN might have a character whitelist to prevent overloads of combining or layout-altering characters, and not have to worry about the behavior of newly added characters. There were some comment threads a few years ago that were just stacks of hundreds of combining diacritics that would crash some rendering engines and create odd decorated text on others.

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

#342

Post by spacehunt »

pron wrote: post #222
spacehunt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The are characters outside of the BMP that are in daily use in my native tongue (Cantonese).

Right, those should definitely be a part of Unicode. That's no excuse for emojis.

If you think of Unicode as a standard that enables the ease of exchange of textual data among parties, would that change your mind? People have been putting emojis alongside text (think SMS) long before Unicode put them into the standard at the request of Google and Apple.

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

#343

Post by thaumasiotes »

msbarnett wrote: post #338
thaumasiotes wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Do you think that 福倒 should have a code point? > Yes. If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way. This doesn't make any sense. We talk about things in text by using words, not direct representations. A dog emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing dogs in text, and a 福倒 emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing 福倒s in text. Shou…

> A dog emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing dogs in text, and a 福倒 emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing 福倒s in text. "Necessary" is an ill-defined and reductive way of looking at communication. History has shown us that you can't draw bright lines between things you, in the abstract, have decided are the "necessary" subset, and expect the world to follow along. Linguists have come to unde…

> "Necessary" is an ill-defined and reductive way of looking at communication.

I took "If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way" as implying that the two clauses were related to each other. Saying "if we want to be able to talk about it" means you're talking about what's necessary for that purpose.

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

#344

Post by thaumasiotes »

ximeng wrote: post #326
thaumasiotes wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting comments, thanks. It is used in company names, which would make it awkward not to have an encoding for it: there are many characters used just in names in Chinese that would leave locations and people having unencodable names if the characters were not in Unicode.

> there are many characters used just in names in Chinese that would leave locations and people having unencodable names if the characters were not in Unicode

I was under the impression that this describes the current state of affairs, and has since before Unicode came around. I know I've read an article about someone whose 姓 was 马 and whose personal name was a character composed of three 马 stacked left-to-right (which might have been pronounced cheng?) getting harassed because the government couldn't encode the name.

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

#345

Post by thaumasiotes »

ximeng wrote: post #328
thaumasiotes wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is used in discussions of the character, would you not consider that text? it does seem to have a more figurative than literal reference than most characters, in a way that I am not sure how to translate into English.

Use of 囍 in discussions of the character 囍 can be reasonably considered nominal use (that is, use within a name). The use of a concrete object to directly represent itself isn't really the same thing as the use of language to refer to a concrete object.

edit: I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about "it does seem to have a more figurative than literal reference than most characters, in a way that I am not sure how to translate into English", in Chinese if necessary. (No guarantee I'll understand it, but I'm interested.)

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

#346

Post by leoc »

hypertexthero wrote: post #252
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.

Agreed. Although I had never worked with the Unicode Consortium, I [submitted a proposal][1] for an international symbol for an observer and it was eventually accepted. [1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/01/international-symbo...

Ooh. One reason that's nice is because it adds one of the Smalltalk-72 symbols ( http://www.esug.org/data/HistoricalDocuments/Smalltalk72/Sma... , see p. 16) that was missing from Unicode.

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

#347

Post by failrate »

Semiapies wrote: post #339
gwbas1c wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because it's easier to throw in random icons than to actually accomplish the goal of "every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years", or even "past 20 years". Or, put another way: 'We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.' https://modelviewcultu…

This is a link by the article's author that is intended to make it easier for us to add useful symbols: https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode I recommend you use it to add any glyphs that you feel are being neglected.

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

#348

Post by yrro »

j4_james wrote: post #219
heinrich5991 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW on my screen, they're really distinguishable: https://i.imgur.com/IdUK8MV.png .

That looks like your browser is somehow misinterpreting the character set of the page. What you're seeing appears to be something like code page 437 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 ) rather than unicode. What browser/os are you using? Is it possible you're going through a proxy that is altering the HTTP headers?

Could be that he has a font that provides code page 437-like outlines for those codepoints.

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

#349

Post by dragonwriter »

eridius wrote: post #325
jshevek wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a shame. Its one thing to have absolute, iron fisted control over your own platform - its another to intentionally seek to limit people's self expression on other platforms by influencing the standard in this way.

Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if you read the article, Apple wasn't the only party in favor of nixing the emoji.

You can think a company should have a say and still think it's windy to use that say in a particular way.

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

#350

Post by yrro »

shabbyrobe wrote: post #220
mirekrusin wrote: post #216

Would they consider "fuck you" (middle finger) character? I think it would be very useful and quite popular.

They already did! http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f595/index.htm

Only the right hand though?
Post reply on HN