3 ms·

Oh no you don't! One of the reasons that putting Emoji into the Unicode character set is silly is that anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them

Oh no you don't! One of the reasons that putting Emoji into the Unicode character set is silly is that anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want. If the meaning of a message changes because of the font being used, then the sender (and, by proxy, their OS's developers) shouldn't have used text for such things in the first place. Making short-sighted engineering decisions doesn't give anyone leverage to dictate how I display text on my devices. On a related note, the whole business around "racist" or "sexist" emoji is just as ridiculous. Unicode dictates things like "Construction Worker"; if you want that to display as male, female, black, white, cat, dog, alien or whatever then just select an appropriate font (or blame the OS/font developer for gender/race bias). The answer is not to add white-male-construction-worker, black-male-construction-worker, white-female-construction-worker, etc. The idea of race/gender modifiers is better, but at that point you might as well make a paint program with a colour picker and a "flood fill" tool.

StavrosK 10y ago
> anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want Yes, and you could make a font to render the "a" character as "g". It doesn't mean that the Man is oppressing Apple by making them render "a" as "a" in their devices, and neither is Apple free to render any letter as any other, as they see fit. Standards are standards for that exact reason, and that's what Unicode is.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols. Plus the fact that the only 'meaning' of characters like "a", "g", etc. is to represent themselves as distinguished from the other characters (which is taken to its logical conclusion in binary: each symbol represents itself as distinguished from the other one). Hence replacing an "a" with a "g" is to entirely replace the complete meaning of the symbol. What Apple's done may, possibly, somewhat change some of the, already ambiguous, meaning of the gun symbol. BTW, I wasn't trying to imply that Apple may be 'oppressed' by "the Man". I just don't want to see a future change to the Unicode standard mandating that particular symbols be rendered into particular arrangements of pixels, which I could certainly imagine the likes of Apple et al pushing for in order to work around their self-induced problems.
  - RIMR 10y ago
    >Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols. It's actually referred to as "REVOLVER". If they replaced the car emoji with a helicopter, would you defend that since they represented a vehicle symbol with a vehicle? A water gun and a revolver are about as different as a sedan and a helicopter...
odabaxok 10y ago
Unicode describes the character as: "A gun emoji, more precisely a pistol. A weapon that has potential to cause great harm. This type of firearm is commonly held by police officers." http://emojipedia.org/pistol/ http://emojipedia.org/pistol/ EDIT: However, I am not sure how official is this source. unicode.org simple says its a "Pistol".

StavrosK 10y ago

> anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want Yes, and you could make a font to render the "a" character as "g". It doesn't mean that the Man is oppressing Apple by making them render "a" as "a" in their devices, and neither is Apple free to render any letter as any other, as they see fit. Standards are standards for that exact reason, and that's what Unicode is.

chriswarbo 10y ago
Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols. Plus the fact that the only 'meaning' of characters like "a", "g", etc. is to represent themselves as distinguished from the other characters (which is taken to its logical conclusion in binary: each symbol represents itself as distinguished from the other one). Hence replacing an "a" with a "g" is to entirely replace the complete meaning of the symbol. What Apple's done may, possibly, somewhat change some of the, already ambiguous, meaning of the gun symbol. BTW, I wasn't trying to imply that Apple may be 'oppressed' by "the Man". I just don't want to see a future change to the Unicode standard mandating that particular symbols be rendered into particular arrangements of pixels, which I could certainly imagine the likes of Apple et al pushing for in order to work around their self-induced problems.
- RIMR 10y ago
  >Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols. It's actually referred to as "REVOLVER". If they replaced the car emoji with a helicopter, would you defend that since they represented a vehicle symbol with a vehicle? A water gun and a revolver are about as different as a sedan and a helicopter...

odabaxok 10y ago

Unicode describes the character as: "A gun emoji, more precisely a pistol. A weapon that has potential to cause great harm. This type of firearm is commonly held by police officers." http://emojipedia.org/pistol/ http://emojipedia.org/pistol/ EDIT: However, I am not sure how official is this source. unicode.org simple says its a "Pistol".