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

Post by ximeng » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 7:18 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #344

ximeng wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (whi…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #322

MichaelGG wrote: post #263

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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-... )

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.

Post by pc2g4d » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #189

igravious wrote: post #129

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How are traffic signs not in "running text" in books about the rules of the road and such like?

Running text means INSIDE text (as in: "running along" with the other characters), not "used in a book as illustration".

Post by a_t48 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

lilyball wrote: post #334

etatoby wrote: post #233

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A text file, a webpage, or a database table can only contain textual data in a given encoding. That's because every byte stored in the file, for example byte number 188, either means "¼" (as it does in ISO/IEC 8859-1, aka. Latin-1 or ANSI), or it means "ỳ" (as in ISO/IEC 8859-14) or "ｼ" (in JIS X 0201, one of the many Japanese encodings that were devised over the years.) How do you know which encoding a certain file…

Fun fact: Japanese even has a word for foreign characters, "gaiji", and it's extremely common in Japanese ePUBs to use small square images very frequently for characters not in the current font, using the term "gaiji" in the CSS class names used for these characters. And at least one mainstream ePUB reader has special code to detect these gaiji and adjust its rendering to make them behave better.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 7:42 PM UTC

et-al wrote: post #327

Tyr42 wrote: post #281

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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.

计算着 [jisuanji] is the older usage that harkens back to the days when computers were mainframes and terminals and not in every household. Generally everyone says 电脑 [diannao] these days.