Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 254 posts

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#41

Post by colejohnson66 »

koboll wrote: post #30
etamponi wrote: post #4

By the same reasoning, the 7-eyed O has now been used more than once, so it deserves a glyph! So the right way to do this is to introduce a new character for the correct glyph, and also leave the current one (perhaps changing the title). Otherwise these tweets won't make when read by someone that updated to Unicode 15.0

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images.

You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Besides, there's room for 1,112,064 codepoints[a], and only 149,146 are in use. It's predicted we'll never use it up, so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need?

[a]: U+10'FFFF max; it used to be U+FFFF'FFFF, but UTF-16 and surrogates ruined that

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#42

Post by cyral »

lmkg wrote: post #9
kratom_sandwich wrote: post #2

I love this character and I love the fact that is being updated. Just to get this right: at some point some person chose to doodle the letter instead of writing it the correct way and now we have a corresponding Unicode character? Sort of amazing and it also makes you think ...

There was a... "tradition" is a strong word, perhaps "trend" is better. Authors making copies of the Bible or related works in Cyrillic, that the letter O (equivalent to Roman O) at the beginning of the word for "eye" would be stylized to look like an eye. There are a variety of glyphs along these lines: Ꙩ, Ꙫ, Ꙭ. All of them, including ꙮ, were added to Unicode as a single group. The glyph "ꙮ" was used to refer to an…

> modern computers are capable of a more-faithful rendition of the transcription of a single handwritten copy of the Book of Psalms.

I wonder if there is even a copy of the book transcribed to actual characters or if it only exists as scanned PDF copies? If anyone did transcribe it, would they have any knowledge that the ꙮ character even exists on computers?

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#43

Post by jrockway »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #20

Quoted post unavailable.

I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't.

Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why the post office has a 〒 on it. That people get any use out of emoji outside of Japan is really pure luck.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#45

Post by shadowgovt »

Stamp01 wrote: post #35

I don't understand why this character needs to exist given that, at least according to the author, it has only been seen once in the wild, and it's semantically identical to another more widely used character. I'm glad I'm not responsible for unicode. Clearly I have the wrong mindset for it.

It's been seen once in the in-print wild.

There's no way to know how many since-written documents will break if a whole codepoint is dropped.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#47

Post by djur »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #41
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

Unicode doesn't have a character for every illuminated initial, nor should it. I'm not clear on why this character should be considered any differently.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#48

Post by shadowgovt »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #37

I want to be that person that has so much time on their hand they can afford to waste it on pointless things like this.

There's a career path to get there. It involves becoming someone who cares deeply about the ways and means of digitizing data stored in analog media. Drill down deep enough, and you'll find yourself in a fascinating world of coding an error.

There are things like the "ghost characters," which are codepoints in Japanese that map to characters that were basically transcription errors when the team was putting together a full set of Kanji. Some characters with an extra horizontal line snuck into the set; they were likely caused by a transcription error because the character got split onto two pieces of paper by lines of text being copy-pasted into a records book, and the shadow cast by the thin extra layer of paper was misinterpreted as another stroke.

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#49

Post by diimdeep »

Being stuck on macOS Catalina with Unicode 12, I think there is a way to upgrade to newer versions and get new emoji support [1][2]

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278937/is-there-a-... [2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#50

Post by shadowgovt »

jrockway wrote: post #43
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #20

Quoted post unavailable.

I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't. Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why…

I've even heard emoji referred to as "the carrot that keeps the implementations current." Every time a new version of Unicode is published, a few more emoji are tacked on. It acts as incentive for all the cellphone carriers and such to put the money into updating their implementations, because nobody wants to be the one on the block with the one phone that can't render "Mirror Ball" .

(ETA: LOL, Hacker News drops "Mirror Ball" https://emojipedia.org/mirror-ball/ from the comment when you post)

Post reply on HN