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U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

ionathan.ch

31–40 of 312 posts

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

#31
post #22

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 combi…

If we assume a signed int for available space

Note that as it is currently defined, the Unicode codespace ranges from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, with some reserved codepoints (eg to encode surrogate pairs), yielding a total number of 1,112,064 assignable code points.

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

#32
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Not yet. Even the 2021 request [1] to remove Klingon from the Not The Roadmap list [2] is in hiatus.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/

[2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf

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

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Did it? It was proposed a few times; did the last proposal actually land?

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

#34
post #22

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 combi…

We can't assume a signed int, as character encodings limit the number of codepoints: "Excluding surrogates and noncharacters leaves 1,111,998 code points available for use." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#:~:text=Excluding%20su...

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

#35

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…

Should we also have slanted, bold, semi-bold, light and underlined versions of every code point? Versions with/without serifs? For monospaced text? Those are all presentational matters. That we have super/subscripts in Unicode in the first place seems to have been just a hack to help terminal emulator software deal with obsolete encodings like ISO-8859-1: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00159-ucsterminal.txt

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

#36
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unicode had to define the bidirectional rendering

Why? They could have left this for a higher layer to handle.

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

#37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Klingon made it into Unicode.

No it did not. Klingon was originally proposed in 1997 and rejected in 2001. A second proposal was made in 2016 with more optimistic noises. But AFAIK it has yet to be accepted.

It is also, like Tengwar and Cirth (which AFAIK remain unincluded even though they are on the BMP roadmap), held back on IP grounds. To my knowledge, the IP issues remain fully unresolved.

Klingon is included in the ConScript registry, but that is unrelated to unicode itself, it performs ad-hoc and non-standard allocations in private use areas.

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

#38

I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up unicode characters and upload pirated games and movies there to share with each other. The only way to open those directories was to specifically type the exact path in unicode, simply double clicking on the folder in filezilla or windows explorer resulted in a error. Sometimes the admins themselve…

I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.

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

#39

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 name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward trend line on a graph.

Or a lightning bolt through a window (with only the bottom-left of the window frame being visible).

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

#40

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…

> Notably, it appears that anyone could register a glyph with the AFII for a fee of 5$ to 50$ (about 8.60$ to 86$, accounting for inflation). Even if the International Glyph Register can be found, it likely merely contains another table with the glyph, the indentifier, and the short description. To know its origins would require the original registration request that added the character, but it’s unlikely that such old documents from a now-defunct non-profit organization in the 90s would have been kept or digitized.

Could be any random kid who found out about this and wanted the cool symbol they made up registered.

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