371–380 of 429 posts
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> Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. And then what? It's already 11% full.
And then we expand it again, like we did at the earlier 2000's. UTF8 will support it by default, UTF16 will stay broken, UTF32 will break, but nobody uses the later.
I didn't know that UTF-16 was considered broken. In what way is it so?
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> For CJK characters, they unified all semantically similar han-characters, even when they have visual forms that are quite different between Japanese, Chinese and Korean. This isn't true. 青 and 靑 are the same character written differently; they have their own codepoints. Ditto for a huge number of simplified Chinese characters; 语 is mainland Chinese and 語 is the same character in Japanese.
It is true for lots of characters (so I guess I was being a little hyperbolic when I said "all"), and you cannot rely on choosing the correct code points in order to have a text display Japanese or Chinese. You need to tell your rendering program (often through choice of font) if things are to be rendered with Japanese or Chinese forms. I wouldn't know how to show you examples here, as 直 will 直 display the same since…
Han unification is generally seen as a bad choice in retrospect, but it was something Unicode had to do when it looked like 2^16 codepoints were all they were going to get.
The past tense of "lead" (rhymes with bead) is not also "lead". When did the word "led" disappear from the English language?
We fixed it in the title above. Don't forget that we're fortunate enough to have a great many non-native English speakers here.
I want to strangle "reporters" who write articles for the NYT, Washington Post, etc. who get this wrong all the time.
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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 sur…
How about usage in this passage: 囍事 http://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20160623000760-260115 In response to your edit, I mean that it has cultural resonance that is unusually strong in relation to its linguistic overtones, in many ways similar to the semantic timbre of a character like 福. The level of abstraction is different from English because of the ideographic nature of characters that means the visual appeara…
Having said that, I note that 喜事 appears in my dictionaries with the gloss "wedding" (well, "any occasion meriting joy, particularly a wedding"), 囍事 does not, and since 囍 is a symbol of weddings which is generally assumed by the Chinese to have the same pronunciation as 喜 it makes for very natural wordplay to substitute it into the word for wedding. I would draw a pretty close analogy with the $ of "Micro$oft" -- it's use in running text, but it shouldn't be taken as evidence that $ is a letter in English.
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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 comp…
More importantly, ask why it seems unreasonable that a small number of very widely-used ISO standard symbols were incorporated quickly? Wouldn't that be the most reasonable expectation since it lacks the political heat of e.g. Han unification and doesn't require any research or debate to establish that they are used, have a precise meaning, and are not covered by existing codepoints?
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> Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? One might have a right to do something and yet be wrong to do it. Apple had every right to do what they did, but they were completely, totally and undeniably in the wrong to do it. Everyone associated with their action should be ashamed. Honestly, they should all resign: their behaviour demonstrates th…
Your comment is ridiculously extreme. They were not "undeniably" in the wrong. You think they were wrong, but that is an highly subjective opinion. In fact, I don't even agree that they were wrong to do this at all. I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue against the inclusion of more gun imagery in Unicode. Also, if you think Apple was wrong, you must also think that Microsoft was (they voiced support), and every…
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You don't have to be able to read the word ON to recognize it as a symbol. "Circle next to zigzag-thing" is as good as circle with line sticking out of it.
But that symbol is in fact a "LOWPOWERMODETOGGLE" and that is a slightly more complicated than a circle broken by a line.
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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…
There's another option: 3) People who love colourful images will use stickers in Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, and soon iMessage. I'm sure WeChat has them too. It's basically like 2), except we've moved from proprietary codepoints to proprietary protocols. I don't mind characters like and or even good old ︎ (which has always been too tiny for its own good). These work in black and white, in different artistic styl…
> characters like and or even good old ︎ (which
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>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.
I got a change into Unicode 9.0 too! It was just a tweak to emoji characters to mark them all as East Asian Full Width instead of Narrow or Ambiguous so that they displayed correctly when using a fixed width font in a terminal console. This probably only matters if you like to use emoji filenames (you mad person), but it felt like a wart so I reported it & had a short back and forth with the chair of the emoji-relate…