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Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols? I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things lik

by wooptoo 10y ago

Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols? I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things like emoji, but having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste. What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?

onion2k 10y ago
having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full. Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's up to the people who are members of the consortium to decide how they want to spend their energy?
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  > Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. And then what? It's already 11% full.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    So? In this 11% it already covers almost all written languages in use and tons of dead ones. It also has lots of classic symbols, from math, book ornaments, standard typographic stuff (left arrow, etc.). So all the basics are covered. We could cover the rest 89% with variations of the turd emoticon and we'll still be perfectly fine.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    And then we expand it again, like we did at the earlier 2000's. UTF8 will support it by default, UTF16 will stay broken, UTF32 will break, but nobody uses the later.
    - Bromskloss 10y ago
      Ah, being able to expand and keep using UTF-8 sounds great. I didn't know that UTF-16 was considered broken. In what way is it so?
      - marcosdumay 10y ago
        The original UTF-16 can only represent 65536 code points, what is less than half the number of unicode codes today. It was broken at the expansion around a decade ago. There's a new, incompatible ("mostly compatible" may explain it better) UTF-16 encoding that represent all unicode codes, but well two formats with the same name is even more broken than only a broken one. UTF-32 will suffer the same fate as UTF-16 if unicode expands. And UTF-8 is capable of representing an absolutely huge number of codes, requiring only non-breaking extensions.
- lsaferite 10y ago
  Doesn't Chinese have over 100k characters all by itself though? http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/eng.htm http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/eng.htm
- GrantSolar 10y ago
  I believe it's an issue with time resources. I would argue that new emoji characters are one of the less important uses of Unicode [1]. You are right that it is entirely up to the members of the Unicode consortium to manage their efforts themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about that. I see a lot of these cases as bikeshedding [1]https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
  - pedasmith 10y ago
    People aren't fungible and there's no special set of people who have been specially blessed to decide what's important all-up. Each area of Unicode is handled by a different set of people who are experts in different areas. If a number of people who use language "a" know that Unicode isn't handling their language, some of them need to step up and provide a solution. Part of that stepping up might be as easy as complaining about the problems they are running into :-), but eventually for a solution to emerge, some set of people need to step forward and handle the Unicode research and paperwork.
function_seven 10y ago
These symbols are useful, no? There's plenty of room in Unicode for more symbols, no reason to be overly frugal with which glyphs are included. > What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards? Then they get added as well.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
amake 10y ago
> useless symbols? Just because they are useless to you doesn't mean they are useless to everyone.
- cJ0th 10y ago
  True but I think that is also problematic. The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important. For instance, I often get e-mails with characters that can't be displayed because my standard fonts (on linux) don't have them. The "missing unicode symbol" icon is the new "picture not found" icon[0] In fact, it is even worse as there is no alt attribute that delineates what I am supposed to see. [0] Remember this one? https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/425274582581264384/X3QXBN8C_400x400.jpeg https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/425274582581264384/X3QX...
  - vardump 10y ago
    > The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important. Why would every font need to cover them in the first place? Just one is enough with symbolic characters, sufficient to display them. Text renderers can deal with that. No font coverage is also fine, at least the data is preserved.
  - nomercy400 10y ago
    Can't the linux font people add these additions to their fonts? It wouldn't be a huge challenge to fix this, would it?
  - amake 10y ago
    > the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important That is a meaningless requirement. The symbols I use on a daily basis already don't exist in a single font. Operating systems handle font fallback just fine.
    - cJ0th 10y ago
      Fair enough but there is no common fallback font that is used by all systems (win, osx, linux, android ...) as a default. Take this page for example: http://emojipedia.org/faq/ http://emojipedia.org/faq/ Only a fraction of the emojis is displayed on my laptop. (maybe 20%)
kbart 10y ago
The usefulness of symbols is subjective. For example, I personally find all these emoji useless, and you clearly stated opposite.
gpvos 10y ago
Which ones do you find useless? And why do you find them less useful than those, in my eyes, extremely useless emojis? I'd say a power on and power off symbol are pretty useful things to have in a font.

by wooptoo 10y ago

onion2k 10y ago

having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full. Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's up to the people who are members of the consortium to decide how they want to spend their energy?

Bromskloss 10y ago
> Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. And then what? It's already 11% full.
- coldtea 10y ago
  So? In this 11% it already covers almost all written languages in use and tons of dead ones. It also has lots of classic symbols, from math, book ornaments, standard typographic stuff (left arrow, etc.). So all the basics are covered. We could cover the rest 89% with variations of the turd emoticon and we'll still be perfectly fine.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  And then we expand it again, like we did at the earlier 2000's. UTF8 will support it by default, UTF16 will stay broken, UTF32 will break, but nobody uses the later.
  - Bromskloss 10y ago
    Ah, being able to expand and keep using UTF-8 sounds great. I didn't know that UTF-16 was considered broken. In what way is it so?
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      The original UTF-16 can only represent 65536 code points, what is less than half the number of unicode codes today. It was broken at the expansion around a decade ago. There's a new, incompatible ("mostly compatible" may explain it better) UTF-16 encoding that represent all unicode codes, but well two formats with the same name is even more broken than only a broken one. UTF-32 will suffer the same fate as UTF-16 if unicode expands. And UTF-8 is capable of representing an absolutely huge number of codes, requiring only non-breaking extensions.
lsaferite 10y ago
Doesn't Chinese have over 100k characters all by itself though? http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/eng.htm http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/eng.htm
GrantSolar 10y ago
I believe it's an issue with time resources. I would argue that new emoji characters are one of the less important uses of Unicode [1]. You are right that it is entirely up to the members of the Unicode consortium to manage their efforts themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about that. I see a lot of these cases as bikeshedding [1]https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
- pedasmith 10y ago
  People aren't fungible and there's no special set of people who have been specially blessed to decide what's important all-up. Each area of Unicode is handled by a different set of people who are experts in different areas. If a number of people who use language "a" know that Unicode isn't handling their language, some of them need to step up and provide a solution. Part of that stepping up might be as easy as complaining about the problems they are running into :-), but eventually for a solution to emerge, some set of people need to step forward and handle the Unicode research and paperwork.

function_seven 10y ago

These symbols are useful, no? There's plenty of room in Unicode for more symbols, no reason to be overly frugal with which glyphs are included. > What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards? Then they get added as well.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

amake 10y ago

> useless symbols? Just because they are useless to you doesn't mean they are useless to everyone.

cJ0th 10y ago
True but I think that is also problematic. The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important. For instance, I often get e-mails with characters that can't be displayed because my standard fonts (on linux) don't have them. The "missing unicode symbol" icon is the new "picture not found" icon[0] In fact, it is even worse as there is no alt attribute that delineates what I am supposed to see. [0] Remember this one? https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/425274582581264384/X3QXBN8C_400x400.jpeg https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/425274582581264384/X3QX...
- vardump 10y ago
  > The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important. Why would every font need to cover them in the first place? Just one is enough with symbolic characters, sufficient to display them. Text renderers can deal with that. No font coverage is also fine, at least the data is preserved.
- nomercy400 10y ago
  Can't the linux font people add these additions to their fonts? It wouldn't be a huge challenge to fix this, would it?
- amake 10y ago
  > the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important That is a meaningless requirement. The symbols I use on a daily basis already don't exist in a single font. Operating systems handle font fallback just fine.
  - cJ0th 10y ago
    Fair enough but there is no common fallback font that is used by all systems (win, osx, linux, android ...) as a default. Take this page for example: http://emojipedia.org/faq/ http://emojipedia.org/faq/ Only a fraction of the emojis is displayed on my laptop. (maybe 20%)

kbart 10y ago

The usefulness of symbols is subjective. For example, I personally find all these emoji useless, and you clearly stated opposite.

gpvos 10y ago

Which ones do you find useless? And why do you find them less useful than those, in my eyes, extremely useless emojis? I'd say a power on and power off symbol are pretty useful things to have in a font.