4 ms·

That's one of patio11 points, I don't quite get: in 2021, _are_ there names which can't be encoded as unicode?

dathinab 6y ago
Yes but very few as far as I know. There are also names which have no written form. Also as far as I remember there are cases where there are multiple "forms" of the same character which theoretically should be purely cosmetic but over time the same name with some of it's characters in different forms has developed different "meanings" which for countries in which the "meaning" of a name matters is a relevant difference. But as they normally don't mean anything different they have the same code point in unicode and (had when I read about it) no modifier to denote the differences either. So while this names can somewhat be written they would have to be written in a form which can be seen as degraded by the person having the name and as such forcing them to do so might be seen as mean, impolite maybe even slightly insulting. Sadly I don't have a reference to the article anymore. Also I don't remember the languages this appeared in but I think it was related to mandarin but I'm not completely sure. Still the technical overhead of supporting non-unicode is massive and in general not worth it for nearly any application. Exceptions include historical use-cases cases and government use-cases. Also unicode strives to cover "all there is" so it might be "fixed" by now in some form or another.
pdw 6y ago
I've heard that Unicode doesn't encode many rare Chinese/Japanese characters that only occur in personal names. In practice these people are forced to change their names. Here's an example: https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE6801RZ20100901 https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE...
anoncake 6y ago
And if so, what can you do? Store a picture?
- dathinab 6y ago
  It depends on your use-case. For most companies I guess you would just ignore it as any alternative would be not worth it by a far shot. For some special cases using the private use area(s) + a db storing images of the glyph + auto generating a font including glyph generated from the images could be one solution. Another would be to force people to change their names. For other use cases (e.g. historic) storing a Unicode "approximation" of the name and a picture for the name (full or parts of it) can be a viable alternative, allowing you to generally just have Unicode but still store the information which was discarded when approximating the name in Unicode. Also trying to extend Unicode can always be a option.

Yes but very few as far as I know. There are also names which have no written form. Also as far as I remember there are cases where there are multiple "forms" of the same character which theoretically should be purely cosmetic but over time the same name with some of it's characters in different forms has developed different "meanings" which for countries in which the "meaning" of a name matters is a relevant difference. But as they normally don't mean anything different they have the same code point in unicode and (had when I read about it) no modifier to denote the differences either. So while this names can somewhat be written they would have to be written in a form which can be seen as degraded by the person having the name and as such forcing them to do so might be seen as mean, impolite maybe even slightly insulting. Sadly I don't have a reference to the article anymore. Also I don't remember the languages this appeared in but I think it was related to mandarin but I'm not completely sure. Still the technical overhead of supporting non-unicode is massive and in general not worth it for nearly any application. Exceptions include historical use-cases cases and government use-cases. Also unicode strives to cover "all there is" so it might be "fixed" by now in some form or another.

pdw 6y ago

I've heard that Unicode doesn't encode many rare Chinese/Japanese characters that only occur in personal names. In practice these people are forced to change their names. Here's an example: https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE6801RZ20100901 https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-china-names-idAFTRE...

anoncake 6y ago

And if so, what can you do? Store a picture?

dathinab 6y ago
It depends on your use-case. For most companies I guess you would just ignore it as any alternative would be not worth it by a far shot. For some special cases using the private use area(s) + a db storing images of the glyph + auto generating a font including glyph generated from the images could be one solution. Another would be to force people to change their names. For other use cases (e.g. historic) storing a Unicode "approximation" of the name and a picture for the name (full or parts of it) can be a viable alternative, allowing you to generally just have Unicode but still store the information which was discarded when approximating the name in Unicode. Also trying to extend Unicode can always be a option.