21 ms·

A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters (2016)

488 points by pcr910303 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 7y ago
Is there a reason this is being posted now, or does this need a (2016) in the title?
- CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
  It indeed was covered here at the time... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952765 ... so yes, as per convention it should have a (2016). The best way to get the message to the mods is via email (using the Contact link at the bottom of the page).
- dang 7y ago
  I'm guessing it seemed like it would be even more awesome than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21686643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21686643. 2016 added.
pdq 7y ago
led, not lead.
- dang 7y ago
  Fixed. Thanks! Those are surprisingly hard to spot sometimes.
  - pvg 7y ago
    Moderation software idea: globally replace lede/lead with led in any discussion about lede vs lead. Would bury the led once and for all.
3JPLW 7y ago
This is a great story. Next up: I'd love to see the sub/super proposal get some more attention and effort. https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal
- moultano 7y ago
  Having the combining character version of that would be fantastic. Eventually, It would be amazing if all the details of math rendering could make it into unicode.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    > Eventually, It would be amazing if all the details of math rendering could make it into Unicode. I'm not sure if I agree with you or not... Generally I'd say I do, but we're going to have a hard time "finding the line". Meaning what counts as "math"? Surely 1 + 1 is, as is ∇×𝐇, and we can start to do things like x⁰. However, what about a graph with nodes and edges (just as an example)? Is that "math"? One things strikes me about strings of characters... you can select and copy/paste them (at least in my native alphabet of Latin) very reliably. This property is not present with Unicode in general.
    - chris_wot 7y ago
      It’s not easy to select characters in Arabic and many Vedic languages.
  - ygra 7y ago
    "All details of math rendering" probably fall squarely into "markup" territory, thus outside Unicode. At least so far any efforts trying to standardize this led to this. Math is generally nothing I'd call plain text.
    - wl 7y ago
      Should Unicode be able to represent Egyptian Hieroglyphs? The lack of similar facilities for Egyptian is why Unicode is useless for representing hieroglyphs, despite having a goodly number of signs encoded.
re 7y ago
It's disappointing that OS-included font support for these has apparently lagged. iOS 13.2 supports emoji from Unicode 12[1], but doesn't ship with a font that includes these symbols. Anyone know if any OSes do support them? [1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-13.2/new/ https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-13.2/new/
- cosmie 7y ago
  iOS 13.3[1] support these symbols. [1] The 13.3 Beta I'm currently running on my 6S Plus renders them fine.
  - re 7y ago
    By the way, if you're viewing them on the unicodepowersymbol.com website, they show up because of a web font included on the page. So here they are on a site without the font: ⏻⏼⭘⏽⏾ Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol#Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol#Unicode
    - cosmie 7y ago
      Ah, that makes sense. I retract my statement – those symbols are still MIA on 13.3.
nsxwolf 7y ago
What is a half character?
- grzm 7y ago
  From the article: > "So, ⭘ is our ½ character "
  - LilBytes 7y ago
    Oh the irony of this comment not working. :)
    - nixpulvis 7y ago
      Works for me :P
      - s_gourichon 7y ago
        I can't tell if the rendering I see is correct or not. Can you describe the correct rendering and some incorrect yet probable one(s)?
        oftenwrong 7y ago
        It is a "heavy circle". This page may help: https://decodeunicode.org/en/u+02B58 https://decodeunicode.org/en/u+02B58
- andai 7y ago
  For power off button they reused Heavy Circle.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  a character is a character. You can't say its only a half
  - cyborgx7 7y ago
oska 7y ago
Input into a decision like this might be one of the best approximations of achieving immortality.
ramshorns 7y ago
I give this achievement 4½ stars. http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-half-star.html http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-ha...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
nixpulvis 7y ago
I love how iOS doesn't understand this URL, and still doesn't have these characters. Too busy removing the Taiwanese flag, and implementing "Animojis".
- phkahler 7y ago
  I still think unicode should not have added emojis. The big guys are adding animated emojis now, and that's clearly out of scope for character sets. If they continue down that path unicode will eventually become SVG with animation. IMHO they should have stopped short of emojis.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    While I agree with your sentiment, can you define "emoji"?
    - NateEag 7y ago
      A graphical or iconographic concept that cannot be unambiguously represented by a single character in any natural language and which does not have a single standardized rendering (e.g. the Power symbol does have a single standard rendering and is therefore not an emoji). I'm no character or Unicode expert - that's just a wild stab in the dark, largely based on why I dislike emoji being in Unicode.
    - jimnotgym 7y ago
      I still prefer ASCII style smilies to emojies ;-) I promise to never do that on HN again!
      - ksaj 7y ago
        My sister pointed out that I'm a little random about mixing them. I use both, based solely on what I feel like typing at the time. And I'm acutely aware that the emojis she sees are not the ones I do, but the ASCII ones are pretty much the same, since I use Android and she's an Apple-head. Besides, I love the slobbering ASCII guy ;-p~~~~ None of the emojis let you amplify slobber according to need like that.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682
blt 7y ago
I have some good ideas for emojis, but I'm guessing that's even harder to get through...
- phkahler 7y ago
  Poop is in there, and the love hotel.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    Those have a compatibility story though
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
stiray 7y ago
I know a guy, who was fighting hard with unicode consortium for adding two characters with meaning "begining of blob, end of blob". Imagine how simpler the coding would be without the need to escape anything. Unfortunately he didnt succeed. They were more busy adding smileys.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  You'd have to escape those new symbols if they occur within the blob.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    Just add a `\` /s
    - joosters 7y ago
      That's too lazy, we need unicode symbols for escaped start-blob and escaped end-blob /s
      - majewsky 7y ago
        Not sure why /s. Also, you only need escaped-end-blob. start-blob can safely be used inside a blob. So it's only 3 new codepoints, which is genuinely an interesting proposal.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        Because that doesn't round trip. You need to be able to distinguish whether the blob originally had "end-blob" or "escaped-end-blob". So now you need another character for double-escaping, and so on, and so on. To avoid that issue you're back to either adding a backslash, or doubling up the character inside the blob... but if you're doing that you could have just used " all along. No need for new characters! If you really don't want to change the contents of the blob, and can't length-prefix, then you could also use a new UUID as your delimiter each time you embed a blob.
ggm 7y ago
Power up stars for the first person to successfully argue for removal of a UNICODE character.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  Imagine if we didnt just have a snowman, but also happened to have a cute bear.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  Scanning quickly through I found this one: ℻ (https://unicode-table.com/en/213B/ https://unicode-table.com/en/213B/). Apparently it's semantically fac·sim·i·le. Which means (according to Google) "an exact copy, especially of written or printed material." My argument is something like, why not just write FAX. Or is the counter that some fonts will specialize this character to something closer to the native language? That seems unlikely, and instead people will probably learn that FAX means "to make alike", from Latin. Or is it that we need to make it just a little bit above the baseline to indicate that it's special. Surely "FAX" isn't the only thing that should be allowed to be special, right? But then that's a whole can of worms. Anyway, I'm rambling... This was the best I could do in the limited time I had (I really should be asleep by now).
  - mongol 7y ago
    I assume it was intended to indicate after a telephone number that a telefax was connected to it. For example when writing contact details on a business card.
    - flomo 7y ago
      Probably right on the rationale, but I cannot remember anyone using FAX as a symbol. But, not the only obsolete bit of technology in Unicode though.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    It is in regards to a facsimile machine, its operation, and the output from it. FAX doesn't refer to every meaning of facsimile out there. https://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3Afacsimile+machine https://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3Afacsimile+machine "a device that can send or receive pictures and text over a telephone line." This search is more appropriate.
Buttons840 7y ago
> What other useful and/or important symbols are missing from Unicode? Seems like a good time to ask this question again. Any new answers?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Prince's love symbol: https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/ https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-...
- sjwright 7y ago
  The USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth symbols. A spray can to represent spray paint, insect spray, or spray lubricant. There's a power plug but no power socket. There's no staples or stapler. There are no appliances—no oven, microwave, toaster, mixer, washer, or vacuum cleaner. There's no traffic cone.
  - joosters 7y ago
    I guess the power socket might prove contentious, since they look very different across countries... power plugs, although variable, can be identified more easily since they look more alike and have a power cord attached. The traffic cone would be good for VLC! They could give rename their app so the name matches the icon :-) That got me thinking: are there any common apps that use emojis in their name?
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Rename VLC to “TRAFFIC CONE GLYPH”?
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    > The USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth symbols. I believe those are all trademarked. Unicode tries to avoid those. > A spray can to represent spray paint, insect spray, or spray lubricant. Interesting idea! I wonder if there'd be any interest in getting wider coverage of other bitmap paint tools: rectangular selection, lasso, paint bucket... > There's a power plug but no power socket. That's problematic from a localization perspective, as electrical sockets vary widely from country to country, and some of them may be difficult to recognize as a socket at a small size. For example, some European countries use a socket which is made of three circular pins in a straight line -- it'd just look like an ellipsis. Besides, there isn't a lot of symbolic meaning that's conveyed by a socket that couldn't be expressed just as well with a plug. > There's no staples or stapler. Maybe. There isn't a lot of symbolic meaning to these either, though. > There are no appliances—no oven, microwave, toaster, mixer, washer, or vacuum cleaner. A lot of those will just look like white boxes at text size, and -- again -- they don't have a lot of symbolic meaning. You might be able to make a case for an upright vacuum cleaner, though, since that's visually distinctive and is associated with cleaning. > There's no traffic cone. Oh, I like that idea. It's got some symbolic meanings, too, like "warning" and "under construction". There is already a construction sign (U+1F6A7), though.
lokedhs 7y ago
I posted a message on the Unicode mailing list, which eventually lead to an proposal to accept a large number of new characters that encodes symbols used in the old 8 and 16-bit micros. My original question was specifically about the C64 character set, but we managed to get several others covered as well, including several symbols from the Atari ST character set. The proposal was accepted, and the work continues to create a new proposal covering the character sets of even more old computers. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf I'm quite happy that my modest question led to some real progress.
- Baeocystin 7y ago
  That is awesome! Nice work. :)
- jimnotgym 7y ago
  I'm disappointed to find that the Atari ST character set doesn't contain a bomb symbol. Obviously two entirely different things have been confused by my childhood mind.
  - bradleyjg 7y ago
    Early macs had a bomb symbol. It was what showed up for the equivalent of the BSOD.
  - gmac 7y ago
    Hmm. The Atari ST did display bombs when it crashed. The number of bombs was a hint about the cause. It always felt very alarming and had me scrambling for the 'off' switch, though. http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15500 http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15500
  - lokedhs 7y ago
    The Atari ST did display bombs when an application crashed. But it was never part of the character set. It's a graphic that is displayed by the trap handler in the operating system. The number of bombs indicate the trap type, so three bombs means trap handler 3 (address error). The symbols that do exist, but was not included in the proposal was the Atari logo and the J.R. Dobbs picture. Both of which are copyrighted, which is why they are included.
imhoguy 7y ago
Is there a practical upper limit of Unicode set capacity? Kind of IPv4 limits with all reservations and local/multicast quirks.
- kijin 7y ago
  Unicode has 17 planes. Each plane has 65,536 code points, so the total capacity is 1,114,112 code points. In practice it's a bit less, thanks to surrogates, private areas, and a bunch of "non-character" code points. That still leaves close to a million code points. Last time I checked, just over 13% of the available public space was allocated. Most of the planes remain unused.
  - detaro 7y ago
    And combinations are used, so e.g. a new emoji only takes zero to one new code point, not one code point per variation. (zero because if I remember right the emojis for families are just something like "woman + boy + girl + man", all existing characters, joined by Zero-Width Joiners)
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Why 17 and not a round number like 16? That would give a nice “round” one mebicodepoints
    - kijin 7y ago
      BMP + 16 planes. You can blame UTF-16 for this mess. Unicode was originally meant to be able to encode two billions (2^31) characters. It bent over backwards to accommodate the limits of the bastard child that is UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)
      - colejohnson66 7y ago
        Maybe they did it because Windows was backwards and used UCS-2, and later, UTF-16? If somehow, Windows managed to switch to UTF-8, I’m sure they (Microsoft) would mess it up and keep the 4 byte limit (imposed by Unicode) there even if it’s later removed (for backwards compatibility). What Microsoft really needs to do, IMO, is rewrite the Windows API to use UTF-8 or UTF-32. Make a `wwchar` type or something...
kuharich 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682
edent 7y ago
It has been 3 years, and Android & iOS still don't fully support Unicode 9. Any ideas who I should bug about that? Google's Noto font hasn't released anything for 2 years. No idea if Apple's default font is open source.
a3n 7y ago
The "advisor" to the effort is doing interesting work on nano-grids, timely because of the PG&E shutoffs. > We had the very generous help of Bruce Nordman, who was involved in the original IEEE 1621 standard. http://nordman.lbl.gov/ http://nordman.lbl.gov/
gambiting 7y ago
I love how this was apparently accepted into the standard in 2016, and yet Chrome still displays an empty square instead. Unicode is such an unbelivable mess when it comes to support it's crazy. Windows displays it correctly for me in Word, but when pasted into Teams it comes out as a semicolon instead. Brilliant.
- toyg 7y ago
  But it’s not a mess, there is a clear chain of responsibility: * consortium -> font developers -> app developers. If anything is broken, bitch to the first level (typically app devs) and wait for your grievance to percolate upwards as necessary; if it doesn’t happen, you know who to blame. * most modern operating systems have hopefully sorted out their issues a long time ago.
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    If you have to complain, it's broken. As a consumer I don't care what the issue is and who the responsible party is. Unicode is a clusterfuck exactly because the chain is too long and the implementation errors are too easy to make and the world is rife with incomplete implementations.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Makes sense to just use image-replacement if you need emoji to show up reliably, like on a landing page. Also spares you the problem of emoji implementation differences. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/516048/22-emojis-look-completely-different-different-phones https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/516048/22-emojis-look-co...
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Is it really so surprising that updating a universal standard takes time? IMO, these processes should happen slowly.
      - LunaSea 7y ago
aembleton 7y ago
Does anyone know how to add these to Ubuntu 19.10? When I search for Power in Characters, it has the 'Power On' character but you can't see the symbol [1] 1. https://imgur.com/a/4qMgPkv https://imgur.com/a/4qMgPkv
- ygra 7y ago
  http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23fd/fontsupport.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23fd/fontsuppor...
kingludite 7y ago
I really like the smiling poop and everything but [personally] I've only ever needed a feed icon⸮
peterburkimsher 7y ago
That post inspired me to submit some Unicode characters as well! I found 11 Hakka & Taiwanese characters when trying to scrape & parse the Bible as plain-text, and wrote a blog post about my experience of the submission process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968110
kensai 7y ago
Great work, but we are still missing a "tinfoil hat" symbol in Unicode (or as Emoji). This is a major letdown! :D
yoloClin 7y ago
Now if only we could get Hacker News to support emojis Edit: This comment ended in man-shrugging, but Hacker News stripped the emoji.
- athenot 7y ago
  They used to be supported until they were abused.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Maybe only allow them if you have a certain reputation/points like downvoting and flagging has? Then if it’s abused, remove that privilege for that person (IIUC, flag rights can be revoked)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ahakki 7y ago
  You get a single emoji on HN 🧡
unhammer 7y ago
Wonderful :) Now can we please have this:? https://www.xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon https://www.xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  We already have the interrobang, no? So why not this?
deaps 7y ago
>> ⏻ To The People! That line at the end made me smile.
Havoc 7y ago
Any idea why 4/5 don't display until I enable javascript?
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> There was some discussion around ⏾ as several “moon” characters already existed. None of them [...] convey the semantic meaning of “Sleep” – so ⏾ was accepted. I'm not convinced ⏾ conveys that meaning either, unless it's explicitly used alongside the other new symbols. And if it is used alongside those symbols, a couple of the existing moons could also work just fine. (⏾ is appearing as tofu on HN for me, but I'm just going to roll with it.)
ericfrederich 7y ago
Even the existing repurposed one doesn't work on my up-to-date Linux Mint installation. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2B58/browsertest.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2B58/browsertes...
joshdance 7y ago
Very cool. Never really considered how new characters were added. Thanks for sharing!

488 points by pcr910303 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

notatoad 7y ago

Is there a reason this is being posted now, or does this need a (2016) in the title?

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
It indeed was covered here at the time... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952765 ... so yes, as per convention it should have a (2016). The best way to get the message to the mods is via email (using the Contact link at the bottom of the page).
dang 7y ago
I'm guessing it seemed like it would be even more awesome than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21686643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21686643. 2016 added.

pdq 7y ago

led, not lead.

dang 7y ago
Fixed. Thanks! Those are surprisingly hard to spot sometimes.
- pvg 7y ago
  Moderation software idea: globally replace lede/lead with led in any discussion about lede vs lead. Would bury the led once and for all.

3JPLW 7y ago

This is a great story. Next up: I'd love to see the sub/super proposal get some more attention and effort. https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal

moultano 7y ago
Having the combining character version of that would be fantastic. Eventually, It would be amazing if all the details of math rendering could make it into unicode.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  > Eventually, It would be amazing if all the details of math rendering could make it into Unicode. I'm not sure if I agree with you or not... Generally I'd say I do, but we're going to have a hard time "finding the line". Meaning what counts as "math"? Surely 1 + 1 is, as is ∇×𝐇, and we can start to do things like x⁰. However, what about a graph with nodes and edges (just as an example)? Is that "math"? One things strikes me about strings of characters... you can select and copy/paste them (at least in my native alphabet of Latin) very reliably. This property is not present with Unicode in general.
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    It’s not easy to select characters in Arabic and many Vedic languages.
- ygra 7y ago
  "All details of math rendering" probably fall squarely into "markup" territory, thus outside Unicode. At least so far any efforts trying to standardize this led to this. Math is generally nothing I'd call plain text.
  - wl 7y ago
    Should Unicode be able to represent Egyptian Hieroglyphs? The lack of similar facilities for Egyptian is why Unicode is useless for representing hieroglyphs, despite having a goodly number of signs encoded.

re 7y ago

It's disappointing that OS-included font support for these has apparently lagged. iOS 13.2 supports emoji from Unicode 12[1], but doesn't ship with a font that includes these symbols. Anyone know if any OSes do support them? [1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-13.2/new/ https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-13.2/new/

cosmie 7y ago
iOS 13.3[1] support these symbols. [1] The 13.3 Beta I'm currently running on my 6S Plus renders them fine.
- re 7y ago
  By the way, if you're viewing them on the unicodepowersymbol.com website, they show up because of a web font included on the page. So here they are on a site without the font: ⏻⏼⭘⏽⏾ Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol#Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol#Unicode
  - cosmie 7y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. I retract my statement – those symbols are still MIA on 13.3.

nsxwolf 7y ago

What is a half character?

grzm 7y ago
From the article: > "So, ⭘ is our ½ character "
- LilBytes 7y ago
  Oh the irony of this comment not working. :)
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    Works for me :P
    - s_gourichon 7y ago
      I can't tell if the rendering I see is correct or not. Can you describe the correct rendering and some incorrect yet probable one(s)?
      - oftenwrong 7y ago
        It is a "heavy circle". This page may help: https://decodeunicode.org/en/u+02B58 https://decodeunicode.org/en/u+02B58
andai 7y ago
For power off button they reused Heavy Circle.
saagarjha 7y ago
a character is a character. You can't say its only a half
- cyborgx7 7y ago

oska 7y ago

Input into a decision like this might be one of the best approximations of achieving immortality.

ramshorns 7y ago

I give this achievement 4½ stars. http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-half-star.html http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-ha...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

nixpulvis 7y ago

I love how iOS doesn't understand this URL, and still doesn't have these characters. Too busy removing the Taiwanese flag, and implementing "Animojis".

phkahler 7y ago
I still think unicode should not have added emojis. The big guys are adding animated emojis now, and that's clearly out of scope for character sets. If they continue down that path unicode will eventually become SVG with animation. IMHO they should have stopped short of emojis.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  While I agree with your sentiment, can you define "emoji"?
  - NateEag 7y ago
    A graphical or iconographic concept that cannot be unambiguously represented by a single character in any natural language and which does not have a single standardized rendering (e.g. the Power symbol does have a single standard rendering and is therefore not an emoji). I'm no character or Unicode expert - that's just a wild stab in the dark, largely based on why I dislike emoji being in Unicode.
  - jimnotgym 7y ago
    I still prefer ASCII style smilies to emojies ;-) I promise to never do that on HN again!
    - ksaj 7y ago
      My sister pointed out that I'm a little random about mixing them. I use both, based solely on what I feel like typing at the time. And I'm acutely aware that the emojis she sees are not the ones I do, but the ASCII ones are pretty much the same, since I use Android and she's an Apple-head. Besides, I love the slobbering ASCII guy ;-p~~~~ None of the emojis let you amplify slobber according to need like that.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682

blt 7y ago

I have some good ideas for emojis, but I'm guessing that's even harder to get through...

phkahler 7y ago
Poop is in there, and the love hotel.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Those have a compatibility story though
deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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stiray 7y ago

I know a guy, who was fighting hard with unicode consortium for adding two characters with meaning "begining of blob, end of blob". Imagine how simpler the coding would be without the need to escape anything. Unfortunately he didnt succeed. They were more busy adding smileys.

bonoboTP 7y ago
You'd have to escape those new symbols if they occur within the blob.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  Just add a `\` /s
  - joosters 7y ago
    That's too lazy, we need unicode symbols for escaped start-blob and escaped end-blob /s
    - majewsky 7y ago
      Not sure why /s. Also, you only need escaped-end-blob. start-blob can safely be used inside a blob. So it's only 3 new codepoints, which is genuinely an interesting proposal.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Because that doesn't round trip. You need to be able to distinguish whether the blob originally had "end-blob" or "escaped-end-blob". So now you need another character for double-escaping, and so on, and so on. To avoid that issue you're back to either adding a backslash, or doubling up the character inside the blob... but if you're doing that you could have just used " all along. No need for new characters! If you really don't want to change the contents of the blob, and can't length-prefix, then you could also use a new UUID as your delimiter each time you embed a blob.

ggm 7y ago

Power up stars for the first person to successfully argue for removal of a UNICODE character.

jakeogh 7y ago
Imagine if we didnt just have a snowman, but also happened to have a cute bear.
nixpulvis 7y ago
Scanning quickly through I found this one: ℻ (https://unicode-table.com/en/213B/ https://unicode-table.com/en/213B/). Apparently it's semantically fac·sim·i·le. Which means (according to Google) "an exact copy, especially of written or printed material." My argument is something like, why not just write FAX. Or is the counter that some fonts will specialize this character to something closer to the native language? That seems unlikely, and instead people will probably learn that FAX means "to make alike", from Latin. Or is it that we need to make it just a little bit above the baseline to indicate that it's special. Surely "FAX" isn't the only thing that should be allowed to be special, right? But then that's a whole can of worms. Anyway, I'm rambling... This was the best I could do in the limited time I had (I really should be asleep by now).
- mongol 7y ago
  I assume it was intended to indicate after a telephone number that a telefax was connected to it. For example when writing contact details on a business card.
  - flomo 7y ago
    Probably right on the rationale, but I cannot remember anyone using FAX as a symbol. But, not the only obsolete bit of technology in Unicode though.
- ksaj 7y ago
  It is in regards to a facsimile machine, its operation, and the output from it. FAX doesn't refer to every meaning of facsimile out there. https://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3Afacsimile+machine https://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3Afacsimile+machine "a device that can send or receive pictures and text over a telephone line." This search is more appropriate.

Buttons840 7y ago

> What other useful and/or important symbols are missing from Unicode? Seems like a good time to ask this question again. Any new answers?

viraptor 7y ago
Prince's love symbol: https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/ https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-...
sjwright 7y ago
The USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth symbols. A spray can to represent spray paint, insect spray, or spray lubricant. There's a power plug but no power socket. There's no staples or stapler. There are no appliances—no oven, microwave, toaster, mixer, washer, or vacuum cleaner. There's no traffic cone.
- joosters 7y ago
  I guess the power socket might prove contentious, since they look very different across countries... power plugs, although variable, can be identified more easily since they look more alike and have a power cord attached. The traffic cone would be good for VLC! They could give rename their app so the name matches the icon :-) That got me thinking: are there any common apps that use emojis in their name?
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Rename VLC to “TRAFFIC CONE GLYPH”?
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > The USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth symbols. I believe those are all trademarked. Unicode tries to avoid those. > A spray can to represent spray paint, insect spray, or spray lubricant. Interesting idea! I wonder if there'd be any interest in getting wider coverage of other bitmap paint tools: rectangular selection, lasso, paint bucket... > There's a power plug but no power socket. That's problematic from a localization perspective, as electrical sockets vary widely from country to country, and some of them may be difficult to recognize as a socket at a small size. For example, some European countries use a socket which is made of three circular pins in a straight line -- it'd just look like an ellipsis. Besides, there isn't a lot of symbolic meaning that's conveyed by a socket that couldn't be expressed just as well with a plug. > There's no staples or stapler. Maybe. There isn't a lot of symbolic meaning to these either, though. > There are no appliances—no oven, microwave, toaster, mixer, washer, or vacuum cleaner. A lot of those will just look like white boxes at text size, and -- again -- they don't have a lot of symbolic meaning. You might be able to make a case for an upright vacuum cleaner, though, since that's visually distinctive and is associated with cleaning. > There's no traffic cone. Oh, I like that idea. It's got some symbolic meanings, too, like "warning" and "under construction". There is already a construction sign (U+1F6A7), though.

lokedhs 7y ago

I posted a message on the Unicode mailing list, which eventually lead to an proposal to accept a large number of new characters that encodes symbols used in the old 8 and 16-bit micros. My original question was specifically about the C64 character set, but we managed to get several others covered as well, including several symbols from the Atari ST character set. The proposal was accepted, and the work continues to create a new proposal covering the character sets of even more old computers. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf I'm quite happy that my modest question led to some real progress.

Baeocystin 7y ago
That is awesome! Nice work. :)
jimnotgym 7y ago
I'm disappointed to find that the Atari ST character set doesn't contain a bomb symbol. Obviously two entirely different things have been confused by my childhood mind.
- bradleyjg 7y ago
  Early macs had a bomb symbol. It was what showed up for the equivalent of the BSOD.
- gmac 7y ago
  Hmm. The Atari ST did display bombs when it crashed. The number of bombs was a hint about the cause. It always felt very alarming and had me scrambling for the 'off' switch, though. http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15500 http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15500
- lokedhs 7y ago
  The Atari ST did display bombs when an application crashed. But it was never part of the character set. It's a graphic that is displayed by the trap handler in the operating system. The number of bombs indicate the trap type, so three bombs means trap handler 3 (address error). The symbols that do exist, but was not included in the proposal was the Atari logo and the J.R. Dobbs picture. Both of which are copyrighted, which is why they are included.

imhoguy 7y ago

Is there a practical upper limit of Unicode set capacity? Kind of IPv4 limits with all reservations and local/multicast quirks.

kijin 7y ago
Unicode has 17 planes. Each plane has 65,536 code points, so the total capacity is 1,114,112 code points. In practice it's a bit less, thanks to surrogates, private areas, and a bunch of "non-character" code points. That still leaves close to a million code points. Last time I checked, just over 13% of the available public space was allocated. Most of the planes remain unused.
- detaro 7y ago
  And combinations are used, so e.g. a new emoji only takes zero to one new code point, not one code point per variation. (zero because if I remember right the emojis for families are just something like "woman + boy + girl + man", all existing characters, joined by Zero-Width Joiners)
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  Why 17 and not a round number like 16? That would give a nice “round” one mebicodepoints
  - kijin 7y ago
    BMP + 16 planes. You can blame UTF-16 for this mess. Unicode was originally meant to be able to encode two billions (2^31) characters. It bent over backwards to accommodate the limits of the bastard child that is UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Maybe they did it because Windows was backwards and used UCS-2, and later, UTF-16? If somehow, Windows managed to switch to UTF-8, I’m sure they (Microsoft) would mess it up and keep the 4 byte limit (imposed by Unicode) there even if it’s later removed (for backwards compatibility). What Microsoft really needs to do, IMO, is rewrite the Windows API to use UTF-8 or UTF-32. Make a `wwchar` type or something...

kuharich 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682

edent 7y ago

It has been 3 years, and Android & iOS still don't fully support Unicode 9. Any ideas who I should bug about that? Google's Noto font hasn't released anything for 2 years. No idea if Apple's default font is open source.

a3n 7y ago

The "advisor" to the effort is doing interesting work on nano-grids, timely because of the PG&E shutoffs. > We had the very generous help of Bruce Nordman, who was involved in the original IEEE 1621 standard. http://nordman.lbl.gov/ http://nordman.lbl.gov/

gambiting 7y ago

I love how this was apparently accepted into the standard in 2016, and yet Chrome still displays an empty square instead. Unicode is such an unbelivable mess when it comes to support it's crazy. Windows displays it correctly for me in Word, but when pasted into Teams it comes out as a semicolon instead. Brilliant.

toyg 7y ago
But it’s not a mess, there is a clear chain of responsibility: * consortium -> font developers -> app developers. If anything is broken, bitch to the first level (typically app devs) and wait for your grievance to percolate upwards as necessary; if it doesn’t happen, you know who to blame. * most modern operating systems have hopefully sorted out their issues a long time ago.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  If you have to complain, it's broken. As a consumer I don't care what the issue is and who the responsible party is. Unicode is a clusterfuck exactly because the chain is too long and the implementation errors are too easy to make and the world is rife with incomplete implementations.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Makes sense to just use image-replacement if you need emoji to show up reliably, like on a landing page. Also spares you the problem of emoji implementation differences. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/516048/22-emojis-look-completely-different-different-phones https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/516048/22-emojis-look-co...
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Is it really so surprising that updating a universal standard takes time? IMO, these processes should happen slowly.
    - LunaSea 7y ago

aembleton 7y ago

Does anyone know how to add these to Ubuntu 19.10? When I search for Power in Characters, it has the 'Power On' character but you can't see the symbol [1] 1. https://imgur.com/a/4qMgPkv https://imgur.com/a/4qMgPkv

ygra 7y ago
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23fd/fontsupport.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23fd/fontsuppor...

kingludite 7y ago

I really like the smiling poop and everything but [personally] I've only ever needed a feed icon⸮

peterburkimsher 7y ago

That post inspired me to submit some Unicode characters as well! I found 11 Hakka & Taiwanese characters when trying to scrape & parse the Bible as plain-text, and wrote a blog post about my experience of the submission process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968110

kensai 7y ago

Great work, but we are still missing a "tinfoil hat" symbol in Unicode (or as Emoji). This is a major letdown! :D

yoloClin 7y ago

Now if only we could get Hacker News to support emojis Edit: This comment ended in man-shrugging, but Hacker News stripped the emoji.

athenot 7y ago
They used to be supported until they were abused.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  Maybe only allow them if you have a certain reputation/points like downvoting and flagging has? Then if it’s abused, remove that privilege for that person (IIUC, flag rights can be revoked)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ahakki 7y ago
You get a single emoji on HN 🧡

unhammer 7y ago

Wonderful :) Now can we please have this:? https://www.xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon https://www.xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon

colejohnson66 7y ago
We already have the interrobang, no? So why not this?

deaps 7y ago

>> ⏻ To The People! That line at the end made me smile.

Havoc 7y ago

Any idea why 4/5 don't display until I enable javascript?

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> There was some discussion around ⏾ as several “moon” characters already existed. None of them [...] convey the semantic meaning of “Sleep” – so ⏾ was accepted. I'm not convinced ⏾ conveys that meaning either, unless it's explicitly used alongside the other new symbols. And if it is used alongside those symbols, a couple of the existing moons could also work just fine. (⏾ is appearing as tofu on HN for me, but I'm just going to roll with it.)

ericfrederich 7y ago

Even the existing repurposed one doesn't work on my up-to-date Linux Mint installation. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2B58/browsertest.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2B58/browsertes...

joshdance 7y ago

Very cool. Never really considered how new characters were added. Thanks for sharing!