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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

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Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#22

Post by coderdude »

Using Unicode shapes and vector-based icons is a great step forward. They're not suitable for every use-case but for most purposes they work well. Lately I've been using Font Awesome[1] to a great extent.

Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it?

[1] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#23

Post by verroq »

philwelch wrote: post #15
redthrowaway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(╯ಠ益ಠ)╯︵ ┻━┻ So it does. This may or may not be a good thing.

I felt that it would cross some imaginary line to go around actually flipping tables on HN, so I edited it out of my comment after I saw that it worked. But what the hell: ┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)

>>>/reddit/

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#26

Post by viraptor »

philwelch wrote: post #5

Huh, I didn't know Arc was that good at Unicode. It even renders the flip table emoticon.

Alternatively it doesn't care at all. I mean, it may not even try to check the incoming encoding or do anything with it and you'd still get the right result if your browser behaves in a sane way (that is sends utf form contents to this site). It's just some bytes after all.

But I don't know the arc internals - does it do anything interesting with unicode?

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#29

Post by alx »

coderdude wrote: post #22

Using Unicode shapes and vector-based icons is a great step forward. They're not suitable for every use-case but for most purposes they work well. Lately I've been using Font Awesome[1] to a great extent. Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it? [1] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

Could you give us some use-cases where it's not suitable? Thanks :)

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#30

Post by coderdude »

alx wrote: post #29
coderdude wrote: post #22

Using Unicode shapes and vector-based icons is a great step forward. They're not suitable for every use-case but for most purposes they work well. Lately I've been using Font Awesome[1] to a great extent. Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it? [1] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

Could you give us some use-cases where it's not suitable? Thanks :)

When you want an icon that isn't one color (font-base icons like Font Awesome or using Unicode), or when you require a graphic with a high amount of detail. There isn't really a good, cross-browser solution for that that I'm aware of. SVG works to some extent but I don't think it's very easy to work with. Another instance where image-based icons win over font-based icons is when the icon has a lot of small detail. Like a shopping cart (that isn't just a solid, but has the little lines) or an icon representing a list. The lines look imbalanced or one will be thicker than the other. I'm sure this is different across operating systems and browsers but the problem exists. Though you can fix that by never using those icons at a small size.

Edit:

One thing I hadn't thought of that was brought up by another commenter is that some people override the fonts used in a site's stylesheets and force only their font preference to be used (mostly for readability). This would mess with font-based icons. I can't think of a way to detect this but it's something to consider when choosing font-based icons. Maybe JavaScript betrays the actual font being used and you can detect and patch it at run-time for those users.

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