4 ms·

> Ideally, the document format should specify which parts are in what language. But this is "off-band" information and it kind of defeats the purpose of unicod

> Ideally, the document format should specify which parts are in what language. But this is "off-band" information and it kind of defeats the purpose of unicode. Moreover it is extremely annoying in practice: imagine that you write a text (e.g., a comment on HN) where you want to explain the character differences between japanese and chinese. How do you get to do that? There are no "language selector characters" in unicode!

hibbelig 6y ago
It would be nice if it was possible to write mixed-language Chinese and Japanese here in HN comments. It would also be nice if it was possible to write math here. But neither are possible...
- enriquto 6y ago
  Yes, it's a bit surprising that things like α, β, γ can be written, but not other letters. Yet, you can go a long way using unicode math symbols. EDIT: just to try, it seems that it works 平仮名ひらがな漢字汉字 한자
arm 6y ago
Yes, it would really be great if the Unicode Consortium designated some Unicode codepoints to be combining characters specifying the type of glyph to be used for the preceding Han character… and in fact, it seems like they have (for some at least)! The Variation Selectors Unicode block¹ has three variation selectors designated for this purpose: • U+FE00 VARIATION SELECTOR-1 • U+FE01 VARIATION SELECTOR-2 • U+FE02 VARIATION SELECTOR-3 I assume they work like U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (for 'text presentation' of the preceding character) and U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (for 'emoji presentation' of the preceding character). You can see examples of that in action here². ―――――― ¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_%28Unicode_block%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_%28Unicode... ² — https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/180400/how-to-turn-off-emojis-entirely-on-ios/240450#240450 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/180400/how-to-turn...

hibbelig 6y ago

It would be nice if it was possible to write mixed-language Chinese and Japanese here in HN comments. It would also be nice if it was possible to write math here. But neither are possible...

enriquto 6y ago
Yes, it's a bit surprising that things like α, β, γ can be written, but not other letters. Yet, you can go a long way using unicode math symbols. EDIT: just to try, it seems that it works 平仮名ひらがな漢字汉字 한자

arm 6y ago

Yes, it would really be great if the Unicode Consortium designated some Unicode codepoints to be combining characters specifying the type of glyph to be used for the preceding Han character… and in fact, it seems like they have (for some at least)! The Variation Selectors Unicode block¹ has three variation selectors designated for this purpose: • U+FE00 VARIATION SELECTOR-1 • U+FE01 VARIATION SELECTOR-2 • U+FE02 VARIATION SELECTOR-3 I assume they work like U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (for 'text presentation' of the preceding character) and U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (for 'emoji presentation' of the preceding character). You can see examples of that in action here². ―――――― ¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_%28Unicode_block%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_%28Unicode... ² — https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/180400/how-to-turn-off-emojis-entirely-on-ios/240450#240450 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/180400/how-to-turn...