6 ms·

The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/ http://unicode.org/charts/. If you really wanted you can make them

The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/ http://unicode.org/charts/. If you really wanted you can make them into a font (most of them seem to be vectorized), but since I'm guessing you see most of the added code points as useless why do you care if they show up as boxes? What harm is this stuff causing or going to cause to the standard? We have hundreds of thousands of unassigned code points. Meanwhile, a lot of the "Ys and Zs" added to Unicode have proved to be extremely useful. Unicode's math operator and letter-styling support is what made MathJax (and more generally MathML) possible. They've also helped big time when it comes to accessibility (e.g. screen readers) for mathematics on the internet. Should we have shunted that off to another standard and made the creators of screen readers completely restructure their offerings so they can deal with Unicode characters and "Mathicode" characters? Assuming anyone bothered to implement it, how would that be better than just adding a Unicode category and spending a meager amount of space?

yk 10y ago
Your answer illustrates my point perfectly, first the lack of a reasonable fall back mechanism. Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point ( and theoretically add that character to a open font). A default font would just ship with every OS out there, and suddenly there would be a working fall back. Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. (That is not helped by the roughly 17 standardized encodings that mostly agree with utf-8.)
- mungoman2 10y ago
  > Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point Tip: a quicker way is to copy the unrendered box and Google it.
- leni536 10y ago
  > The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/ http://unicode.org/charts/. If you really wanted you can make them into a font No, last time I checked you are not legally allowed to do that.
  - yk 10y ago
    I checked your link, then I proceeded to the terms of service and IANAL there they claim that all 'unicode software' is basically MIT licensed. (Please check with a lawyer before you conclude that word is MIT licensed.)
    - leni536 10y ago
      Now check any random chart: Fonts The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts. See http://www.unicode.org/charts/fonts.html for a list. Terms of Use You may freely use these code charts for personal or internal business uses only. You may not incorporate them either wholly or in part into any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without express written permission from the Unicode Consortium. However, you may provide links to these charts. The fonts and font data used in production of these code charts may NOT be extracted, or used in any other way in any product or publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface owner(s). The Unicode Consortium is not liable for errors or omissions in this file or the standard itself. Information on characters added to the Unicode Standard since the publication of the most recent version of the Unicode Standard, as well as on characters currently being considered for addition to the Unicode Standard can be found on the Unicode web site. Now you can try to track down the actual typeface owners one by one (this alone seems hopeless) and even then I doubt that you can get permission from all of them.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  > Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. What does that have to do with Unicode adding anything? Are you really claiming that if we threw out Unicode like you recommend, and (if I'm understanding your point correctly) choose an encoding for the new version that looks nothing like ASCII the encoding mess would get better? I think continuing the migration of most transmission of text to UTF-8 and explicitly specifying encodings for everything that needs to stick with Latin-1, etc. is a better option, unless you propose codifying the new encoding in law to force adoption.
pron 10y ago
But all mathematical symbols, except for styled math letters (which would have been equally well served by simply rendering them in italics or in a special math font), were already in the original 16-bit Unicode, as are any characters humans normally associate with "text" (all alphabets except for Egyptian hieroglyphics and other extinct alphabets). How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation?
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  > How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation? In the same way it's useful to standardize letters in various alphabets without standardizing their screen representation. There is semantic content associated with each of these symbols that persists even if there is significant variation in how they are presented. Of the ones you list, emojis are the only ones where this is any more a problematic approach than it is for letters in various alphabets. And as people who don't approve of Unicode adding emojis like to point out, emojis aren't that critical so having some loss in the translation isn't a huge deal. Remember that before emoji standardization various cell phone manufacturers (particularly in Japan if I remember correctly) started using codepoints for whatever they pleased. The alternative to Unicode not standardizing them was to have a repeat of the OEM font gold rush in the SMP. > styled math letters (which would have been equally well served by simply rendering them in italics or in a special math font) That was my first reaction as well, but there are a few problems with that approach: * Math italic characters look very different from normal italics, and are shaped and kerned very differently because they are commonly used for single-letter variables which will be juxtaposed together in expressions. If your goal is to be able to preserve some math formulas in a purely line based text format, preserving this aspect makes a big difference in readability. * Many of the math letters and "letter-like symbols" have associated semantic content (like bold for vectors), which it makes sense to preserve. MathML alleviates this to a significant degree but I don't believe these codepoints were intended only for MathML usage. * On the technical side, OpenType math fonts need to carry associated metadata for many of these characters. Putting them in separate fonts complicates this, since these tables need to refer to glyphs (general codepoints are unsuitable in a number of cases) and each font file would have a different glyph address space.

yk 10y ago

Your answer illustrates my point perfectly, first the lack of a reasonable fall back mechanism. Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point ( and theoretically add that character to a open font). A default font would just ship with every OS out there, and suddenly there would be a working fall back. Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. (That is not helped by the roughly 17 standardized encodings that mostly agree with utf-8.)

mungoman2 10y ago
> Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8 encoding and then look up the code point Tip: a quicker way is to copy the unrendered box and Google it.
leni536 10y ago
> The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points: http://unicode.org/charts/ http://unicode.org/charts/. If you really wanted you can make them into a font No, last time I checked you are not legally allowed to do that.
- yk 10y ago
  I checked your link, then I proceeded to the terms of service and IANAL there they claim that all 'unicode software' is basically MIT licensed. (Please check with a lawyer before you conclude that word is MIT licensed.)
  - leni536 10y ago
    Now check any random chart: Fonts The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts. See http://www.unicode.org/charts/fonts.html for a list. Terms of Use You may freely use these code charts for personal or internal business uses only. You may not incorporate them either wholly or in part into any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without express written permission from the Unicode Consortium. However, you may provide links to these charts. The fonts and font data used in production of these code charts may NOT be extracted, or used in any other way in any product or publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface owner(s). The Unicode Consortium is not liable for errors or omissions in this file or the standard itself. Information on characters added to the Unicode Standard since the publication of the most recent version of the Unicode Standard, as well as on characters currently being considered for addition to the Unicode Standard can be found on the Unicode web site. Now you can try to track down the actual typeface owners one by one (this alone seems hopeless) and even then I doubt that you can get permission from all of them.
johncolanduoni 10y ago
> Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. What does that have to do with Unicode adding anything? Are you really claiming that if we threw out Unicode like you recommend, and (if I'm understanding your point correctly) choose an encoding for the new version that looks nothing like ASCII the encoding mess would get better? I think continuing the migration of most transmission of text to UTF-8 and explicitly specifying encodings for everything that needs to stick with Latin-1, etc. is a better option, unless you propose codifying the new encoding in law to force adoption.

pron 10y ago

But all mathematical symbols, except for styled math letters (which would have been equally well served by simply rendering them in italics or in a special math font), were already in the original 16-bit Unicode, as are any characters humans normally associate with "text" (all alphabets except for Egyptian hieroglyphics and other extinct alphabets). How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation?

johncolanduoni 10y ago
> How useful is it to standardize hieroglyphics, ancient greek musical notation, and emojis as standard text characters esp. without standardizing their screen representation? In the same way it's useful to standardize letters in various alphabets without standardizing their screen representation. There is semantic content associated with each of these symbols that persists even if there is significant variation in how they are presented. Of the ones you list, emojis are the only ones where this is any more a problematic approach than it is for letters in various alphabets. And as people who don't approve of Unicode adding emojis like to point out, emojis aren't that critical so having some loss in the translation isn't a huge deal. Remember that before emoji standardization various cell phone manufacturers (particularly in Japan if I remember correctly) started using codepoints for whatever they pleased. The alternative to Unicode not standardizing them was to have a repeat of the OEM font gold rush in the SMP. > styled math letters (which would have been equally well served by simply rendering them in italics or in a special math font) That was my first reaction as well, but there are a few problems with that approach: * Math italic characters look very different from normal italics, and are shaped and kerned very differently because they are commonly used for single-letter variables which will be juxtaposed together in expressions. If your goal is to be able to preserve some math formulas in a purely line based text format, preserving this aspect makes a big difference in readability. * Many of the math letters and "letter-like symbols" have associated semantic content (like bold for vectors), which it makes sense to preserve. MathML alleviates this to a significant degree but I don't believe these codepoints were intended only for MathML usage. * On the technical side, OpenType math fonts need to carry associated metadata for many of these characters. Putting them in separate fonts complicates this, since these tables need to refer to glyphs (general codepoints are unsuitable in a number of cases) and each font file would have a different glyph address space.