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Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

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Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#151

This is (ab)using unicode, for example the F is actually a Mathematical Bold Fraktur Capital F: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D571 This is terrible for screen readers and the like which are unable to read or understand these unicode characters making accessibility a real concern.

I wonder actually. Google seems to understand these, you can search with them. I wouldn't be surprised if screen readers understand these symbols. They're originally for Mathematics, and I'm sure there's plenty of blind mathematicians.

This is called unicode normalisation, specifically NKFD form. You can do it in two lines of Python. This was covered last time a similar website came up (plagiarising myself):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17752680

unicode normalisation: http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/

Nobody in that thread tried it on an actual screen reader then, either. Someone did mention that iOS got well confused by it, so there's one data point.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#154
post #140

HN is a plain-text site, so we originally buried this. But then we got an email we couldn't refuse (see below). So have at it. All: Please don't submit stories with non-plaintext titles, and please don't post non-plaintext comments in other threads. Thanks! ------------------------------------- 𝕀 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕝𝕪 𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕒 𝕡𝕣𝕠𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥 𝕥𝕠 𝕊𝕙𝕠𝕨 ℍℕ, 𝒶 𝓌ℯ𝒷𝓈𝒾𝓉ℯ 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒸ℴ𝓃𝓋ℯ𝓇𝓉𝓈 𝓉ℯ𝓍𝓉 𝒾𝓃𝓉ℴ…

TIL score = 20

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#155

...and break the crap out of most software.

And yet it works in the weirdest places. Saving some of the text in a file and opening it in a Python interpreter works fine, it even counts the numbers of letters right.

You can even use it in your Python code, for better or worse:

  for 𝖓 in 𝖗𝖆𝖓𝖌𝖊(50):
      if 𝕟 % 15 == 0:
          𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥("𝔽𝕚𝕫𝕫𝕓𝕦𝕫𝕫")
      elif 𝓃 % 3 == 0:
          𝓅𝓇𝒾𝓃𝓉("ℱ𝒾𝓏𝓏")
      elif 𝓷 % 5 == 0:
          𝓹𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓽("𝓑𝓾𝔃𝔃")
      else:
          𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒕(𝒏)
The identifiers are normalized.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#156

This is (ab)using unicode, for example the F is actually a Mathematical Bold Fraktur Capital F: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D571 This is terrible for screen readers and the like which are unable to read or understand these unicode characters making accessibility a real concern.

Can confirm, put a hello world in codepen.io with some other text and JAWS skipped right past it.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#157

I tried some diacritics letters and the site didn't handle those. Is it issue of the site? or those special characters don't include various latin based diacritics? German Umlauts? Polish ąęćłńóśźż ? etc

These special characters were put in Unicode based on their use as identifiers in maths and such. Diacritics aren't used there, so a tool exploiting those character ranges can't support them either.

These characters aren't meant to be used to write words and sentences in.

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#158
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blind mathematicians don't write english to communicate in these unicode blocks... These blocks don't exist to be used for writing words in the english language.

Yes, I just mean to say, if you were creating a screen reader, it wouldn't be that hard to take this sort of thing into account. So, maybe they do. Either way, I'll add a little warning to the site.

Ah yes.. The old "if you were creating , it wouldn't be that hard to take this sort of thing into account"

Re: Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

#159
post #140

HN is a plain-text site, so we originally buried this. But then we got an email we couldn't refuse (see below). So have at it. All: Please don't submit stories with non-plaintext titles, and please don't post non-plaintext comments in other threads. Thanks! ------------------------------------- 𝕀 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕝𝕪 𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕒 𝕡𝕣𝕠𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥 𝕥𝕠 𝕊𝕙𝕠𝕨 ℍℕ, 𝒶 𝓌ℯ𝒷𝓈𝒾𝓉ℯ 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒸ℴ𝓃𝓋ℯ𝓇𝓉𝓈 𝓉ℯ𝓍𝓉 𝒾𝓃𝓉ℴ…

TIL score = 20

Yeah I wouldn't call 48 young. Btw "4 score and 10" is still basically how the French say 90.
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