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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

#411
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This is always true for Emoji. The platforms always decide what their presentation of emoji will look like, just as they determine what font they will use for the unicode traditional letters. In this case, Apple and others decided they didn't want a rifle emoji, so it was moved to the 'black and white symbols' section so that those platforms wouldn't be 'missing' an emoji, which has other technical implications.

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

#412
post #61

Truly amamzing man! I was actually wondering about the electrical symbols for logic gates, such as AND, OR, NOR, XOR, NOT, etc. I would hope they were universally accepted by now and would help when writing books or describing logic. A quick Duck Duck search revealed nothing...?

Electrical symbols in general don't do so well when scaled down to the size of text. Plus, it is very uncommon to encounter the electrical gate symbols inline with text - usually the symbols are sitting in a separate circuit diagram. Nevertheless, Unicode does have all of the logical symbols from mathematics, which are pretty commonly understood: ∧∨¬⊕

Before Unicode made it so, when was there a need for an ice cream or a poo inline with the text? It's a way of expressing language.

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

#413
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 read…

> 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.

You started this conversation with “Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet.” It's hardly moving the goalposts to question how complete Unicode has to be to qualify as “anything like” or how much weight usage should have.

> 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.

Before you could call that proof, you have to clearly articulate the questions it could answer. Note that my first comment indicated a clear understanding of how Unicode works – the process is not in question here, only the thresholds you haven't articulated. All I've been trying to get you to state is precisely what your rules would be for coverage of human languages before we can add anything else and how much usage should factor into that. There's also a much harder question of trying to come up with a rule which to say why a pictograph, the phaistos disc symbols, etc. are valid for inclusion but a modern symbol used millions of times a day around the world to communicate is not?

While thinking about this, it's also worth remembering that despite your apparent belief that emoji are a Western novelty, the question was how to improve Unicode adoption in Japan and that required having an answer for the millions of people who were using systems which relied on non-standard encodings and by most accounts Japanese carriers were resistant to adopting Unicode without having a standard to replace those ad-hoc systems. I think that decision should have been handled differently (i.e. assigning an emoji plane) but it was driven by understandable technical reasons affecting large numbers of people on a daily basis. Since that decision was made, the additional cost to add a small number of non-controversial additions which do not require scholarly research or documentation does not seem excessive — we are, after all, talking about a small percentage of the new symbols in Unicode 9.0.

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

#414
post #357

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!

Similarly, the word "loanword" (used to describe words borrowed from other languages) is gairaigo 外来語 which is literally 外来 (gairai) "foreign" + 語 (go) "word/language". Japanese is filled with words where you can often figure out the meaning purely from the characters used!

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

#415
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As to compatibility, excellent point.

The word "running" doesn't appear on that page. (Actually, no requirements at all appear on that page; it speaks strictly in terms of strengthening or weakening the case for inclusion, not disqualifying.) Can you explain briefly why that page is evidence that the running text requirement does not apply to Chinese, and where it specifies what the running text requirement is?

Alternatively, what requirements do apply to Chinese, and would they preclude an invented character like one with 女 on the left and 离 on the right?

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full. Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's up to the people who are members of the…

I believe it's an issue with time resources. I would argue that new emoji characters are one of the less important uses of Unicode [1]. You are right that it is entirely up to the members of the Unicode consortium to manage their efforts themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about that. I see a lot of these cases as bikeshedding [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...

People aren't fungible and there's no special set of people who have been specially blessed to decide what's important all-up. Each area of Unicode is handled by a different set of people who are experts in different areas.

If a number of people who use language "a" know that Unicode isn't handling their language, some of them need to step up and provide a solution. Part of that stepping up might be as easy as complaining about the problems they are running into :-), but eventually for a solution to emerge, some set of people need to step forward and handle the Unicode research and paperwork.

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it easier to infer that 'O' means off than 'OFF' for a person who does not know any English?

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…

It's not obvious that the "0" is a zero, as opposed to the letter "O" (cyrillic, latin) or the something entirely misleading, as this gesture: http://i.imgur.com/6KZ1nKG.jpg

I suspect the vertical slash | has as many lookalikes as the O, but I won't go there. I do want to mention that, as you demonstrated, the "1" that means on is more often represented as the Latin I or just a vertical stroke as in |, making it just as hard to ID as a numeral, especially if you don't know that the 1/0 are derived from the binary logic gates.

I would argue that the words "ON" and "OFF" when seen as glyphs are much less ambiguous than I/O.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This makes subitizing much more difficult though.

This comment taught me a word. Separately, you are completely correct and this is extremely valid in the design of rating systems.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about icon fonts and font rendering and has nothing to do with Unicode. Code points don't have colour; there's no colour requirements anywhere in the spec. Your fonts don't have to support the entirety of Unicode. That's why we have font stacks and fallbacks.

U+1F499 BLUE HEART U+1F49A GREEN HEART U+1F49B YELLOW HEART U+1F49C PURPLE HEART U+1F53D DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE U+1F536 LARGE ORANGE DIAMOND U+1F537 LARGE BLUE DIAMOND ...

That doesn't directly translate to a color requirement in the font, though.

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

#420
post #79
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's perfectly fine for latin characters. Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from the other control pictures. ␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛…

Imagine if ﷽ was sized to a monospace font.

Just tried it in Emacs, renders just fine

(M-x ucs-insert FDFD)

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