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Announcing Unicode 7.0

unicode-inc.blogspot.com

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Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#51

Post by colanderman »

smackfu wrote: post #36

This page has links to the proposals to add characters: http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2013/10/whats-new-in-unicode-... Including this one with comments on the Wingdings addition. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4239.pdf a) Ireland recommends adding the following new characters to this table: 1F597 REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED 1F598 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS

Note that these glyphs will appear as boxes until font designers get around to adding them to their fonts.

You can have fun with this. Say you're disillusioned with your current job and planning to leave within the year. Insert these into whatever important document you're working on at the time, e.g. as bullet points or decoration around titles. Sometime after you leave, they'll reveal their true nature. A sort of "FU" time-bomb.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#52

Post by greggman »

mmastrac wrote: post #35
jstalin wrote: post #28

Forgive my ignorance, but how do these actually enter the real world? Do browsers adopt these new characters?

Technically the entirety of the unicode range is supported by browsers right now -- they just don't exist in fonts at all. What Unicode does is say that "this codepoint" means "this". At that point, fonts start adding glyphs to mean "this" and authors start adding codepoints that refer to "this". If you look at FontAwesome, it uses characters in the "unicode private use area" -- which are effectively undefined -- but…

Actually AFAICT Chrome does not support the entirety of the unicode range right now. Safari and Firefox do.

🙅🎁４👨

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#53

Post by gioele »

buster wrote: post #43
smackfu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.

And you consider Wingdings a good thing in the first place?! It's an abomination that should never have happened.

But it did happen. And it has been used a lot.

So, for the sake of interoperability and the ability to read back these documents in a future Unicode-only world, we have to encode them.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#54

Post by smackfu »

buster wrote: post #43
smackfu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.

And you consider Wingdings a good thing in the first place?! It's an abomination that should never have happened.

Never said that, but the current situation is that we have glyphs that people are using in documents that can't be represented in Unicode, and that's pretty much the main reason there are Unicode revisions in the first place.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#56

Post by gioele »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #25

Dammit, still no glyph for the Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Don't they realize how much of 1990s music history is unwritable thanks to this glaring omission?

There is no single glyph for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, but you can use combining chars to obtain it.

    01AC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH HOOK
    030A COMBINING RING ABOVE
    0335 COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY
    032C COMBINING CARON BELOW
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML...

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#58

Post by buster »

sho_hn wrote: post #42
buster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand your question. How is a character of a normal language (and i consider chinese normal) different from the picture of crap? And why would we put up a huge library of tiny pictures? If i want to look at cat pics, i don't open up the font browser. And where is the HN-logo unicode point? Can i register my own somewhere? Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or po…

So what about all the characters in Unicode that map to different phonemes or words in different languages? For example, Latin letters are sometimes used for different phonemes in different languages (and dialects, and applications like romanization), and Han logograms are sometimes used for different words/morphemes in different languages. How is that different from "picture of crap" mapping to different specific wo…

The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes.

Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#59

Post by gioele »

hf wrote: post #11

I value the Unicode effort so much, I consider its inconsistencies a major pain point in my life. Why, for the love of Zeus, is there no codepoint for GREEK SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER ALPHA Am I missing something? Why should I never want to subscript α? I know a few physicists who gladly would. It doesn't end there, see the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... which sports a consolidate…

Unicode is not about what you would like to use, but about what has been used in the past. New characters are avoid as much as possible and old characters are allocated a codepoint only if you can show that they have been extensively used and that they are really different from other similarly looking glyphs that already have a codepoint.

Probably nobody has found enough small alphas used in subscripts and there were no electronic encodings that included it so it has never been considered for inclusion.

Re: Announcing Unicode 7.0

#60

Post by masklinn »

mbq wrote: post #49
masklinn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's waste. Waste of what? > Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Most fonts only implements a fraction of unicode, is unicode a waste? Is cyrillic in unicode a waste? Is Cherokee? Braille symbols? Buginese and Meroitic cursive? > Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know? Yes? The software will fall back on a font which does provide the glyphs, or…

For instance a waste of time of font designers; you can make rational decision about including certain alphabets (by analysing the target group demands), but selecting a reasonable subset of bazyllion random, singular pictures to draw and test is a major headache. Obviously this way the users get inconsistent experience.

> For instance a waste of time of font designers

No more so than right now.

> selecting a reasonable subset of bazyllion random, singular pictures to draw and test is a major headache.

Right, because there[0] were[1] no[2] "bazyllion[3] random[4], singular[5] pictures[6] to[7] draw[8] and[9] test[10]" dating back to Unicode 1.0[11] before and Unicode 7.0 changes everything.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_alphanumeric_symbo...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong#Unicode

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominoes#Dominoes_in_Unicode

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_Cards_(Unicode_block)

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_Symbols_(Unicode_block)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(symbol)#Arrows_in_Unicod...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Character_Recognition_(...

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Shapes

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Dingbats

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_Extensions

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical_(Unicod...

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing_(Unicode_block)

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