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U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

ionathan.ch

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Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#21

Post by bayindirh »

rich_sasha wrote: post #15

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

Some of the glyphs you mention are combinatorial code points. i.e. they are multibyte characters combined to a single character. So you add a gender modifier and skin color modifier to change the appearance. You don't add multiple code points.

It's your device rendering these 2-3 byte character sets as single icons/emojis.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#22

Post by knome »

rich_sasha wrote: post #15

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

1) there's only ~150k unicode values defined. If we assume a signed int for available space, we have 2,147,333,647 of 2,147,483,647 remaining. moreso if the int is unsigned. We're fine. 2) they use values that combine like ligatures to create the variants of values. there isn't a combinatorial explosion because color is a modifier value, and sex, and then the underlying symbol. It's not a unique symbol for each combination.

IPv4 ran down because everything needs an IP to be on the net and there are more humans than available addresses, and more gear than humans.

We don't need different characters per human, only to document existing languages and to account for the slow growth of modern hieroglyphs.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#23

Post by imglorp »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11
bamboozled wrote: post #7

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the symbol in use.) […] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed long before eit…

>These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing icon sets in play across different media. These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say the round headed person with their han…

Well, Klingon [edit, was proposed] for Unicode. Maybe someone imported some 70s scifi orthography, just because.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#24

Post by moron4hire »

rich_sasha wrote: post #15

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

Things like skin tone variations are not defined as individual code points. They are sequences of code points that combine to make the full, customized glyph. So you have one code point for "medical", one for "professional", one for "female", one for "brown skin", one for "blond hair", and from that you get a more specific picture of a doctor..

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#25

Post by mkl »

scbrg wrote: post #18
Jarmsy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already U+1F4C9 for that though.

If by "already" you mean "eight years later" :) ⍼ (U+237C) is in Unicode 3.2 (from 2002), (U+1F4C9) is from Unicode 6.0 (from 2010). [edit]: HN ate my 1F4C9 glyph. Use your imagination :)

https://codepoints.net/U+1F4C9 CHART WITH DOWNWARDS TREND

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#26

Post by mkl »

donkeyd wrote: post #16
cheschire wrote: post #10

The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward trend line on a graph. I’m guessing the person who implemented it got this exact requirement wording in the Unicode definition and nothing else, didn’t make the logical connection, and just implemented it as close to literally as they could.

The update under the article has an explanation of where the name probably came from: > I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. If I understand this correctly in the context, this person named the glyph based on what it looked like. So it wasn't the other way around.

It's possible both events happened. The downward trend line character certainly seems like something people might have wanted.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#27

Post by lifthrasiir »

cygx wrote: post #20
blacklion wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of Unicode is to have encoding of all characters used by all languages, past and modern. Subscript and superscript are not used by any language as separate characters, it is typesetting property. It should be solved by other means, not by character/glyph encoding. Should Unicode include ALL characters strike…

Should Unicode contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages? Nope, you'd use markers similar to U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) that already exist to indicate text direction (which is also a typesetting property).

They are relevant because Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering and not every rendering can be automatically inferred from logical (abstract) characters. Unicode has no reason to define the general text rendering including subscripts and superscripts, so there is no reason for Unicode to define control characters for them.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#28

Post by akvadrako »

rich_sasha wrote: post #15

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

We are nowhere close to running out of code points. Unicode as currently defined has 1.1 million, but even that could be increased if there was a need. There isn't, since only 114 thousand are defined.

There are not separate code points for all combinations of genders and skin colors; the characters are made as combinations.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#29

Post by bamboozled »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11
bamboozled wrote: post #7

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the symbol in use.) […] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed long before eit…

>These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing icon sets in play across different media. These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say the round headed person with their han…

I would've thought they'd have a table of every icon and a description or something, maybe at the time it was never taken very seriously or likely to take off as it did, so people didn't bother. Like IPv4...

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#30

Post by IshKebab »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #17
jason0597 wrote: post #5

I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure symbols but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni... To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake , but we will never g…

Unicode superscript and subscript is not intended for mathematical usages [1]. [1] https://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#Pf8

That's a cop out. You could equally say that new emojis shouldn't be added because you should use inline images for those. Or RTL markers shouldn't be added because you should use dedicated text styling for that.

There are a ton of places that don't support superscript markup.

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