2 ms·
No, "characters" is the correct term; U+1C4 is two characters: latin-capital-d followed by latin-capital-z-with-caron (or whatever you want to call the little v
by a1369209993 7y ago
No, "characters" is the correct term; U+1C4 is two characters: latin-capital-d followed by latin-capital-z-with-caron (or whatever you want to call the little v thing). As you note, this means that non-buggy fonts will generally use two glyphs to render it, but that's a implementation detail; a font could process the entire word "the" as one glyph, or render "m" as dotless-i + right-half-of-n + right-half-of-n, but that wouldn't affect how many characters either string has.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- planteen 7y agoUsing characters is confusing because I don't know if you mean before or after shaping. U+1C4 is unquestionably a single Unicode code point. I've heard people call this 1 logical character. Other people might say how many characters it requires for encoding in UTF-8 or in UTF-16. After shaping, some people might say it is 1 or 2 "shaped characters". It's all horribly confusing. I find using the term code point more precise.
- a1369209993 7y agoThere's no shaping involved; I'm not talking about the implementation details of the rendering algorithm. There is a D, followed by a Ž. This only seems confusing because Unicode (and - to be fair - other, earlier character encodings) willfully misinterprets the term "character" for self-serving purposes.