51–60 of 98 posts
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a…
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I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question. Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by…
Check the photos in the article, specifically this one [1] "Haussystem Didot", the title of the catalog, refers to a letter setting by the printing agency Didot, which is the one I linked on wikipedia. The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages. I highly doubt that you eye scanned thousands of pages in French handwritten and mixed typesetted ... within less tha…
> Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages.
You have linked these two Wikipedia pages[1][2], implying that they confirm your extraordinary claims of how obvious and well-known this symbol is. I could in fact check within a single day that the symbol does not appear on any of the 15 images linked in these pages.
So unless you can produce evidence for your claim that "that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?", it is quite disingenuous to expect anyone to take it seriously. Expecting someone else to read "thousands of pages" to confirm or deny YOUR claim makes it even less worthy of consideration.
If you do have actual, material evidence for your claims, everyone in this thread would very much like to see it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
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That’s unavoidable given the goal: Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. https://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
Emojis obviously got in from Japanese character encodings, and imho the world is off better for that. Though many of the extensions of the emoji set really don't seem to get what emojis are used for. Similarly, chess and shogi pieces as well as symbols from Western playing cards go in through previous encodings, and domino tiles got accepted based on being conceptually similar. A bit questionable imho.
On the other hand the Azimuth sign seems to satifsy the "would appear in OCR scans", based on being published in font catalogues. Even if nobody has come forward with a book it appears in, I don't think they made and advertised lead type characters for fun. It has to have had some use in printed publications of some type (probably scientific, from the surrounding context)
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software. Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields. It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche…
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example) For years Ł support on Python on windows for example bro…
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Something got doubled six times in a row, big deal. In the case of the i-ching it's literally six bits of binary (expressed in yarrow stalks). In genetic codons there's four symbols instead of two, and three places instead of six, so the effect is the same. (Does base 4 have a name?)
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Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian . That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridi…
> Great detective work "Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de... I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. Ther…
I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.
This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a…
Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian . That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridi…
> Great detective work "Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de... I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. Ther…
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something got doubled six times in a row, big deal. In the case of the i-ching it's literally six bits of binary (expressed in yarrow stalks). In genetic codons there's four symbols instead of two, and three places instead of six, so the effect is the same. (Does base 4 have a name?)
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