9 ms·
I don't think this communicates the _incredible_ amount of creative and technical work required not only to simply fill out over 100,000 characters in the UTF-8
by ixtli 10y ago
I don't think this communicates the _incredible_ amount of creative and technical work required not only to simply fill out over 100,000 characters in the UTF-8 space but to make them stylistically consistent.
- nkoren 10y agoWork, shmurk! Their set of Akkadian glyphs set looks incomplete, and they don't even have Sumerian or Rongorongo. These guys need to stop sleeping on the job! </sarcasm> (Obviously I'm awed...)
- lisper 10y agoJust FYI, this is not sarcasm, it's ironic humor. Not the same thing. Sarcasm is "the use of irony to mock or convey contempt" which is obviously not what you meant.
- dalke 10y agoAlso, Rongorongo isn't yet in the Unicode standard. Can't fault a Unicode font for not supporting something which isn't there.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- WhitneyLand 10y agoWhat % of people do you estimate would make that distinction?
- lisper 10y agoCall me old fashioned, but I think it's important to know what words actually mean, and to use the words that mean what you actually intend to convey. To quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." (If you're not familiar with that quote, it worth looking it up and reading it in context.)
- haberman 10y agoYes I think what corrupts this ideal is the extent to which words come to represent feelings and associations instead of facts and ideas. Like how "literally" has come to represent the feeling of emphasis, and the association with the experience of one-upping other emphatic adjectives like "extremely."
- ekianjo 10y agoCommon use does not make it right. People using litterally in this way are just showcasing their ignorance.
- RileyKyeden 10y ago> Common use does not make it right. In fact, this is the very mechanism by which language evolves.
- ekianjo 10y agoYou mean degrades?
- RileyKyeden 10y agoBeing flexible with my language doesn't keep me from being precise. I said what I meant.
- maroonblazer 10y agoYou must not be familiar with the "Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist" debate. http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-descriptivism/ http://english.blogoverflow.com/2012/10/prescriptivism-and-d...
- WhitneyLand 10y agoActually not. If you google the debate you'll find there's a history of using the word this way that goes back a very, very, long time in a variety of literature. I have to admit I thought the same as you until someone pointed this out.
- hwjbl 10y agoJesus christ go outside
- lisper 10y agoWhat? And miss all this intellectually stimulating badinage? (Now that was sarcasm.)
- catscratch 10y ago> Just FYI, this is not sarcasm, it's ironic humor. Not the same thing. Sarcasm is "the use of irony to mock or convey contempt" which is obviously not what you meant. Just FYI, you were humorless in your interpretation of his comment. Humorless is "unable to see humor in things when most others do."
- AckSyn 10y agoThere was no humor in the attempt. Can't help that.
- ropable 10y agoYou are technically correct which, as we all know, is the best kind of correct.
- rexpop 10y agoThank you for introducing this notion to me! I struggle with accusations of "sarcasm" when I am not intending to "mock or convey contempt", merely expressing an idea as its more accessible inverse!
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoI'm glad pedantry and nitpicking like this are acceptable on HN and I say this without any intention of irony (or, indeed sarcasm).
- nkoren 10y agoI think it's sarcasm, actually? The target of my wit was not the mad typographers of Google, but rather the HN commentors who like to sprinkle comment threads on awe-inspiring subjects with dismissive pedantry. Sometimes it feels as though the CDC could announce that a universal cure for cancer has passed its phase 3 clinical trials, and the median HN response would be: "does this page really need to load 170kb worth of CSS? And why does it degrade so badly when I run NoScript?" Or like the way that some people, when confronted with the awsome ineffable magnitude of my sense of humour... </Ironic_humor> ;-)
- HCIdivision17 10y agoGosh, there is a lot of depth to language. I like lisper's note because there are a lot of people whose first language is not English and may not know the difference; I like your rejoinder that it was sarcasm against another audience, but was ironic humor to Google. (We can write to multiple audiences at once, no?) And now here's a font complete enough that perhaps I can find the right glyph to punctuate the idea. We need something with a bit more nuance than the interrobang, I think.
- nkoren 10y agoJust to be clear, I quite liked Lister's note as well. I'm a language nerd myself, and always appreciate having more opportunities to cheekily overload some entendres.
- bawana 10y agosarcasm derives from the ancient greek meaning 'tearing of the flesh'. Sarcasm is intended to wound the recipient. Ironic humor is also a poke, but only tickles. I suggest a new word 'gargalism'.
- baldfat 10y agoWebster Dictionary: Sarcasm http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm Full Definition of sarcasm 1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain 2 : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual Nope your Ironic contains sarcasm.
- lisper 10y agoThat's right, sarcasm is a particular kind of irony. And it's not the kind that the OP was employing.
- anotheryou 10y agoand doesn't show it either, which is weird edit: github page gives a glimpse in the header image: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-source https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-source
- robzyb 10y agoI hate to be "that guy", but you are talking about the Unicode space. UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. are just different encodings of the exact same Unicode space.
- jnordwick 10y agoUTF-16 is not an encoding - It's an abomination.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoI wonder whether they used neural style transfer to automatically generate them. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf (See p. 5 for examples.)
- khaled 10y agoThe fonts are mostly built by Monotype, with the exception of CJK fonts which are built by Adobe, in the regular way of designing and building fonts.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoInteresting. Is that clear from the fonts themselves, or did you learn it out of band?
- tangue 10y agoYes I remember a Wikipedia post explaining that Helvetica was the only suitable choice as a font because of this. good job Google.
- rushabh 10y agoMaybe they used AI to style the fonts? Train a neural network on a particular style (thickness, density, curvature) and then write out heuristics to generate new fonts based on other fonts, that get classified by a neural net. Let the bots do all the work. Might be an interesting article if the actually did that.
- vegabook 10y agoactually that was the first thing that came to my mind, what a ginormous job it must have been with a team hunkering down and working with multiple experts from around the world, for many unsung months (maybe years). However I personally believe that Google not shouting about how hard this was, explicitly, makes it all the more commendable. Quiet, amazing work, not shouted from the rooftops by PR/marketing people. Honest, modest, brilliance. Like all the best things.