What's the code point for uppercase superscript Z?
There isn't one. Unicode considers superscripting a matter of presentation, which Unicode doesn't cover, except when it does.
Unicode Is Awesome
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#82Unicode is great, emoji are a (technically impressive) monstrosity.
Excepting some of the weird combining mark tricks used for flags and some more straightforward modifiers for skin tone, they’re basically a bunch of inert codepoints that you can get away with just popping in a high-res PNG for. No complicated typesetting, not even any kerning. If you handle surrogate pairs correctly (which is also needed for some real, widely used languages) common emojis will work fine.
I don’t see what’s technically impressive about them, care to elaborate?
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#83Unicode is pretty amazing. People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that…
If we could go back in time to Unicode's beginning and start over but with all that we know today... Unicode would still look a lot like what it looks like today, except that:
- UTF-8 would have been specified first
- we'd not have had UCS-2, nor UTF-16
- we'd have more than 21 bits of codespace
- CJK unification would not have been attempted
- we might or might not have pre-composed codepoints[0]
- a few character-specific mistakes would have gone unmade
Everything to do with normalization, graphemes, and all the things that make Unicode complex and painful would still have to be there because they are necessary and not mistakes. Unicode's complexity derives from the complexity of human scripts.
[0] Going back further to create Unicode before there was a crushing need for it would be impossible -- try convincing computer scientists in the 60s to use Unicode... Or IBM in the 30s. For this reason, pre-composed codepoints would still have proven to be very useful, so we'd probably still have them if we started over, and we'd still end up with NFC/NFKC being closed to new additions, which would leave NFD as the better NF just as it is today.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#84I mean, awesome for whom? It might be awesome for end users as you can type in or copy/paste things without caring which language you're using. But for programmers, Unicode is a bloated monstrosity and a source of endless nightmare. Eventually, it's not going to be awesome for end users either because it will be plagued by a lot of (subtle) inconsistencies. Unicode looks a lot like a leaky abstraction to me (because…
>but for programmers
I think that depends on what level of the stack you work at. I'm a programmer, but strictly at an end-user-facing level. I'm not implementing Unicode support, I'm using programming languages that already have Unicode support. And Unicode support is an absolute godsend. It's amazing to not have to think about any of that, and just treat it as a solved problem.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#85Unicode is pretty amazing. People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that…
No, where Unicode is complicated is where the Unicode people decided to make it complicated to bolster their egos, to the detriment of everyone downstream of them. Like with most standardization, the people at the helm are the wrong people with the wrong motivations.
You're demonstrably wrong.
Most complexity in Unicode derives from:
- real complexity in human scripts
- politics
Confusability is NOT a problem created by Unicode, but by humans. Even just within the Latin character set there are confusables (like 1 and l, which often look the same, so much so that early typewriters exploited such similarities to reduce part count).
Nor were things like normalization avoidable, since even before Unicode we had combining codepoints: ASCII was actually a multibyte Latin character set, where, for example, á could be written as a' (or 'a), where is backspace. Many such compositions survive today -- for example, X11 Compose key sequences are based on those ASCII compositions (sadly, many Windows compositions aren't). The moment you have combining marks, you have an equivalence (normalization) problem.
Emojis did add a bunch of complexity, but... emojis are essentially a new script that was created by developers in Japan. Eventually the Unicode Consortium was bound to have to standardize emojis for technical and political reasons.
Of course, some mistakes were made: UCS-2/BMP, UTF-16, CJK unification, and others. But the lion's share of Unicode's complexity is not due to those mistakes, but to more natural reasons.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#86I swear there should be some rule or law about how Unicode articles will inevitably muddle code units/points / grapheme clusters / bytes together. > String length is typically determined by counting codepoints. > This means that surrogate pairs would count as two characters. If you were counting code points, a surrogate pair would be 1. If it's two, you're counting code units. > Combining multiple diacritics may be s…
>I swear there should be some rule or law...
Now is your chance! Distill this comment down into something pithy and deathanatos' law could be a thing.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, where Unicode is complicated is where the Unicode people decided to make it complicated to bolster their egos, to the detriment of everyone downstream of them. Like with most standardization, the people at the helm are the wrong people with the wrong motivations.
Interesting statement. Other than maybe han unification, what would you do differently?
u/kazinator is decidedly wrong (see above), but besides not trying CJK unification, I wish we had had UTF-8 from day 0, no UCS-2, no UTF-16, no BMP, no codespace limit as low as 21 bits. That's mostly it. If we could have stood not having precompositions, I'd rather not have had those either, but that would have required a rather large leap in functionality in input modes in the late 80s or early 90s, which would not have been feasible.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#88Unicode is pretty amazing. People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that…
There is way more than enough wacky stuff introduced by Unicode. Having dozens of letters A, for example. And giving a Japanese Kanji character the same code as a Chinese one that usually looks similar.
> There is way more than enough wacky stuff introduced by Unicode. Having dozens of letters A, for example.
You'd have to go back before Unicode to prevent this.
Unicode was created with certain engineering constraints, one of them being round-trip compatibility. This means that it needs to be possible to go from $OTHER_ENCODING -> Unicode -> $OTHER_ENCODING and get a result which is bitwise-identical to the input. In short, Unicode is saddled with the fact pre-Unicode text encoding was a mess, plus the fact people tend to not like irreversible format changes.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that is quite inconsistent. Kanji literally means "Chinese Character" so it should be the same for the letter A. Unless a French A isn't equivalent to an English A.
Cyrillic А is not the same as English A. For example, some fonts render A in a way that looks like Cyrilic Л. (Like The Mandalorian title screen.) This would be incorrect if using the same A for both: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V8fC7bdV-mI/maxresdefault.jpg
I don't see anything special in the linked image. The As look as they would in Latin script.
(probably not what you meant, but just in case: the fourth letter is not a Cyrillic A but a D.)
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#90> Unicode is simply a 16-bit code - Some people are under the misconception that Unicode is simply a 16-bit code where each character takes 16 bits and therefore there are 65,536 possible characters. This is not, actually, correct. It is the single most common myth about Unicode, so if you thought that, don't feel bad. Verity Stob has a great column https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/04/verity_stob_unicode... wher…
It's a myth about the current version of Unicode.
Whether it's true about some obsolete version is hair-splitting at this point.