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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

#381

Post by function_seven »

WalterBright wrote: post #317
function_seven wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a zero and the | is a one. Arabic numerals are more universal, and the convention of 0 for off and 1 for on was established precisely to avoid picking a language. Then the combined glyph for an on/off button was created, along with the similar broken circle glyph for on/standby. Those have squarish proportions, so the corresponding 0 and 1 glyphs are needed to match those proportions. Hence the four symb…

> the convention of 0 for off and 1 for on was established precisely to avoid picking a language I figured that politics was the case. What is less supportable is working backwards from that to concoct a rational reason. People who understand digital electronic conventions are highly unlikely to not recognize "ON" and "OFF". Furthermore, anyone who does not know either would find "ON" just as easy to learn as "|". (T…

We could also use "OHM" instead of Ω and "EUR" instead of €, but symbols provide more concise representations of meaning, especially in the case of a combined ON/OFF button. Much easier to fit the universal circle with 1 in it than "ON/OFF". The broken circle with 1 in it is way smaller than "ON/STANDBY". The other two symbols are then necessary to keep the proportions consistent across all four related glyphs.

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

#382

Post by Sharlin »

pja wrote: post #356

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…

It also matters if you want to use emojis in irssi or equivalent :)

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

#383

Post by marcosdumay »

Bromskloss wrote: post #371
marcosdumay wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, being able to expand and keep using UTF-8 sounds great. I didn't know that UTF-16 was considered broken. In what way is it so?

The original UTF-16 can only represent 65536 code points, what is less than half the number of unicode codes today. It was broken at the expansion around a decade ago.

There's a new, incompatible ("mostly compatible" may explain it better) UTF-16 encoding that represent all unicode codes, but well two formats with the same name is even more broken than only a broken one.

UTF-32 will suffer the same fate as UTF-16 if unicode expands. And UTF-8 is capable of representing an absolutely huge number of codes, requiring only non-breaking extensions.

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

#384

Post by yuhong »

pja wrote: post #356

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…

The fun thing is that I don't think the Windows console can handle anything outside BMP.

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

#385

Post by KenoFischer »

micro2588 wrote: post #380
pja wrote: post #356

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…

Will this eventually solve the "Julia does not like Pizza" issue ( https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/3721 )?

Ideally yes. I'd have to confirm that this extends to Pizza and Koalas. We fixed that issue as much as we could, even going as far as generating our own unicode width tables extracted from unifont, but it wasn't possible to fix in general without support form the terminals. Now that the standard is fixed (hopefully), I don't see a reason why the terminals wouldn't update their tables.

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

#386

Post by 1024core »

akiselev wrote: post #103
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really cool than these things can happen. Still, I can't help but feel like, in a couple of centuries, Unicode is gonna be a goddamn mess.

What isn't a huge goddamn mess after several centuries? If there's one thing we humans don't deal with well, it's entropy.

The Pantheon in Rome.

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

#387

Post by adiabatty »

yrro wrote: post #350
shabbyrobe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only the right hand though?

That's font-dependent. There's nothing stopping you from making a font with a left-handed one, though.

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

#388

Post by sullyj3 »

namaemuta wrote: post #200
kens wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Multiply your rating system by 2 and you won't need half stars :)

This makes subitizing much more difficult though.

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

#389

Post by WalterBright »

function_seven wrote: post #381
WalterBright wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the convention of 0 for off and 1 for on was established precisely to avoid picking a language I figured that politics was the case. What is less supportable is working backwards from that to concoct a rational reason. People who understand digital electronic conventions are highly unlikely to not recognize "ON" and "OFF". Furthermore, anyone who does not know either would find "ON" just as easy to learn as "|". (T…

We could also use "OHM" instead of Ω and "EUR" instead of €, but symbols provide more concise representations of meaning, especially in the case of a combined ON/OFF button. Much easier to fit the universal circle with 1 in it than "ON/OFF". The broken circle with 1 in it is way smaller than "ON/STANDBY". The other two symbols are then necessary to keep the proportions consistent across all four related glyphs.

That's the only argument I've seen for it that makes any sense. I'll counter by saying only "ON" is needed, not "ON/OFF", as the off part is implicit. Same goes for STANDBY.

This has been standard practice for a long time, I'm not just making things up on the fly. BTW, SBY is a standard abbreviation for STANDBY used by the military, if space is a problem. And SBY is a lot more google-able than an icon.

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

#390

Post by [deleted] »

a_t48 wrote: post #357
lilyball wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, you've just caused me to reexamine the word gaijin. gai (外) = outside, jin(人) = person\nationality. gaijin(外字) is outside + character. Neat!

[deleted]
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