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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

#401

Post by colejohnson66 »

yuhong wrote: post #384
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.

Sadly, yes. But he did say "Terminal", so I assumed he meant OS X (ahem... macOS).

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

#402

Post by EdiX »

intopieces wrote: post #354
MichaelGG wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... )

Rifle is included in Unicode 9.0, just without emoji presentation.

What does this mean? How can an emoji not have an emoji presentation?

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

#403

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #333

I was wondering why they would have snowmen in the language. And then it occurred to me that maybe, since the unicode set has so much room for characters, that they were planning to allow cross-language communication through emoticons. Think about it, if you can represent anything human with emoticons. Then you can communicate through emoticons only! Maybe that's what the ancient Egyptians were hopping for?

[deleted]

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

#404

Post by acdha »

Semiapies wrote: post #394
acdha wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're the one making the claim. Can you precisely state what you believe to be the problem and cite some sources that this is a major problem and that nobody is working on it? 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 unifi…

I've already stated my complaint: that getting gratuitous icons into Unicode is easier than actual scripts for human languages. Since you're having Google issues, I'll link you to a page I already mentioned, which it self links to other relevant pages http://unicode.org/standard/unsupported.html I love the echoing nature of these counter-arguments, that a problem doesn't even exist unless it's "major" and "nobody is…

You might find your conversations work better if you respond to what people are actually saying rather than repeating yourself or assuming that other people don't know how to use Google, particularly after they've already sent you links which comprehensively disprove your assertion by demonstrating how many new characters are being added and that emoji constitute less than 1% of the 7,500 new characters in Unicode 9.0.

Since you're hung up on http://unicode.org/standard/unsupported.html, let's read it and see how many languages are missing:

* Loma: 250K speakers, and this is to codify characters used for personal correspondence in the 1930-40s: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10005-n3756-loma.pdf * Naxi Dongba: a pictographic script used by priests in an ethnic group of roughly 300K people: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11178-n4043.pdf

Your original claim was that “Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet” but you're arguing about things which affect something like 0.008% of people – not even their primary usage – and for which there is work in progress to support!

Nobody is saying that Unicode is complete, but like any other human effort there's a limited amount of time to work on things. At some point things which are used daily by billions of people are going to get prioritized over things which are used infrequently by thousands of people, and it's hard to argue that this is wrong even if you – like me – want to have 100% of human language represented in Unicode.

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

#405

Post by kens »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #256
wmil wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want every symbol used in a document to have a unique encoding, so that you can change fonts without losing meaning. Fonts like wingdings are a horrible hack. The idea is one (complex) encoding that will represent the info until the end of time. It creates a lot of trouble, but it's still a good idea.

Technically, glyphs are supposed to meet some standards, like being shown in use in running text, before they can be added to unicode. It's not supposed to be a repository of every picture anyone ever dreamed up. The standards are not applied consistently. Even leaving emoji out of it, the chinese "character" 囍 never occurs in running text, but there it is in unicode.

The character 囍 appears in other standards (big5, JIS, ISO2022_JP), so Unicode is basically obligated to include it for compatibility.

The running text requirement is for symbols, so it doesn't apply to Chinese: http://www.unicode.org/pending/symbol-guidelines.html

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

#406

Post by Semiapies »

acdha wrote: post #404
Semiapies wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already stated my complaint: that getting gratuitous icons into Unicode is easier than actual scripts for human languages. Since you're having Google issues, I'll link you to a page I already mentioned, which it self links to other relevant pages http://unicode.org/standard/unsupported.html I love the echoing nature of these counter-arguments, that a problem doesn't even exist unless it's "major" and "nobody is…

You might find your conversations work better if you respond to what people are actually saying rather than repeating yourself or assuming that other people don't know how to use Google, particularly after they've already sent you links which comprehensively disprove your assertion by demonstrating how many new characters are being added and that emoji constitute less than 1% of the 7,500 new characters in Unicode 9.…

"You might find your conversations work better if you respond to what people are actually saying rather than repeating yourself"

You're going to seriously say that after your last few posts? Two posts into this exchange, you moved the goalposts, and you hammered that button repeatedly.

But at least you actually looked at the proof you repeatedly demanded, even I had already mentioned the pages. You didn't bother reading much of it, or to note that goes well beyond a couple scripts on that page to other incomplete scripts and as-yet entirely unimplemented scripts. But you at least made that minimum effort.

And the limited time to work on these things is exactly the issue. There are scripts not yet in the standard and major language scripts that aren't complete - but we've got "pile of poo" and a slew of emoji. And now, we've got four power button icons that a handful of people demanded.

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

#407

Post by 0xmohit »

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 )?

It already has!

This comment -- https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/3721#issuecomment-...

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

#408

Post by pedasmith »

burkaman wrote: post #253
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?

What about a text, or an article? Books aren't the only source of running text.

And what about email? I have to support POP3 (!); my customers would be seriously unhappy if they can't sent an email with emoji.

Heck, I'd be unhappy. I love adding emoticon and emoji and fun things to my emails.

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

#409

Post by josephmx »

EdiX wrote: post #402
intopieces wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rifle is included in Unicode 9.0, just without emoji presentation.

What does this mean? How can an emoji not have an emoji presentation?

I assume they reserve the unicode character, but anyone who wants to use it decides what it looks like (so the rifle could look different on different platforms, which isn't a big issue)

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

#410

Post by intopieces »

EdiX wrote: post #402
intopieces wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rifle is included in Unicode 9.0, just without emoji presentation.

What does this mean? How can an emoji not have an emoji presentation?

An emoji cannot be an emoji without having emoji presentation. There is a rifle character that resembles, in form and function, the other Olympic emoji, it's just not sitting in the set reserved for emoji. Any platform that wants to pick it up can use it, they can even put it next to all their other emoji if they want to. Apple, et al did not 'prevent' Rifle from being encoded. They just decided they wouldn't pick it up as an emoji for their platform, and the Unicode conference decided to move it to a different category based on that decision.

There are literally thousands of characters that Apple doesn't encode for their platforms. I haven't heard whether Apple will be supporting:

    Osage, a Native American language
    Nepal Bhasa, a language of Nepal
    Fulani and other African languages
    The Bravanese dialect of Swahili, used in Somalia
    The Warsh orthography for Arabic, used in North and West Africa
    Tangut, a major historic script of China
All of which were added to Unicode 9.

>The two characters will still be part of the Unicode spec, but they'll be classed as black-and-white "symbols" instead of regular emoji

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/apple-and-microsoft-pus...

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