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Unicode Proposal – Textile Care Symbols

londons_explore 6y ago
Is it time to admit that simply storing everything as an image is the future? Sure, it isn't technically as neat, but it gives far more flexibility. It happens already in memes (where text is usually part of a gif) Text and text encoding dates back from the days when every byte of storage space mattered. Now lossless high resolution images are the norm, and wouldn't constrain what symbols could be included. If you want to make a word be slightly bendy for style, you can! Accessibility, relayout, etc. can all be done with images too - you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Fonts are a standard and cross-platform way to bundle vector images. Now if we only had some way to figure out which image in the bundle corresponds to what... Maybe some encoding scheme where we assign a numeric ID to each image? (Oh wait...)
- Hackbraten 6y ago
  I strongly disagree. - You can copy a text symbol and put it into a search engine to figure out what it means. - Screen readers can recognize text symbols without needing an alt text. - Text is more flexible on dark or light backgrounds and has better contrast. - Text is better suited for virtual keyboards and auto-correct or auto-replacement. - Text can be used in input fields. - Text has native rendering hints built-in, such as baseline and kerning, which improves inline rendering. - Text is more flexible when choosing a glyph. For example, you can render it larger for the visually impaired, or change fonts and put a special glyph into the font. - Text is more flexible when choosing color vs. black-and-white output. Try printing an emoji to see what I mean.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Tooling could be built to do all of that for images too. For example you could take part of an image and put it into a search engine too... That search engine would take images as input, and where the image represents writing if some kind, it would return relevant results. Screen readers could look into an image and read out any writing found, just like some screen readers can describe an image ("person in boat holding flag"). Deep nets that can do this reasonably well have been around years now.
    - cameronh90 6y ago
      The tooling for doing all that with images is called a font.
    - visarga 6y ago
      You can do all that but you'd have to use a neural net instead of "find..." Neural nets make plenty of errors, including on OCR (at least 2-4%).
    - peterburkimsher 6y ago
      Find my girlfriend a dress that doesn't need ironing. Easy if there's a "do not iron" symbol in text to search. Much harder to grep if it's an image.
- shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago
  How would the software that lets me add text to images work? Presumably it would use unicode. And how would the software that extracts text from an image store the extracted text? If it comes accross a number of symbols from different domains how would it save them, and what table of contents would it use as a reference? Unicode.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    But that's an implementation detail - some software might let you hand write text into an image with a brush or pen, and that might use as its internal representation the X,Y coordinates of the brush strokes.
    - shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago
      So then how will the software convert the X,Y coordinates into text that is read out to a screen reader? I think many of the other comments put it more eloquently than I can.
- yccs27 6y ago
  you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image. Then you still need some way to handle text, and image to text is not reliable. Text simply has so much more distilled information. Images are nice for humans, but I can't imagine them as a storage format for programs.
- Retr0spectrum 6y ago
  you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image. This is extremely non-simple. It is a strictly harder problem than just... encoding image+text in a sane container format like HTML or SVG.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    But with various AI/ML approaches it's now becoming pretty straightforward. And lots of new hardware has ML acceleration.
    - Retr0spectrum 6y ago
      So we train an ML model to convert images to text. How do we encode that text information?
      - j16sdiz 6y ago
        Hyper Textile Markup Language, of course.
- jstimpfle 6y ago
  This is the most absurd thing I've heard this month. The page you are looking at right now is in fact an image that your computer put on screen. However, that fact does not help you when you want to reply to my comment. Or more generally, if you want to edit, transform, store, compress, search. I can easily search 1GB of text on my computer for a specific pattern. I could not even store all that information directly encoded as (say) raster or vector graphics.
thecopy 6y ago
What problem is this solving?
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Printing of textile care labels ... that are on all of your garments, towels and bedclothes.
  - steerablesafe 6y ago
    I wonder how they did it before.
    - practice9 6y ago
      By using custom fonts?
    - Ensorceled 6y ago
      In a complicated manner. Really, why is this a problem for people on HN? I'm hoping it's not what I think it is.
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      I wonder how they did mathematical symbols before. I wonder how they did arrows before. I wonder how they did musical symbols before. I wonder how they did typesetting markers before. I wonder how they did braille before.
    - tremon 6y ago
      It's on the linked page: Wash Care Symbols M54 The font Wash Care Symbols M54 has already implemented textile care symbols. However, they are encoded in the C0 Controls and Basic Latin block.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Using different fonts. A font is just[0] a table that maps numbers to pictures. A typical font will map a number 65 to a picture of what we know as letter 'A' in Latin alphabet. But there's nothing preventing you from making a font that will contain, at index 65, a picture of a dog. Or a "hand washing" symbol. And this is what people did - both to support non-English alphabets in the era where "printable character" meant "7 bits", and to support mixing graphics with text (if you add that missing bit to make a full byte, you get 128 more codes to play with). Ultimately, screens and printers don't understand letters - they understand arrays of color values (or, occasionally, colors attached to parameters of a curve). Fonts are the intermediary, and you can draw anything with text if you supply the right font. The problem is though, if you had a custom mapping of characters to pictures, you had to ship it with your text, and make sure users know how to configure their software to use your specific font for your text. Unicode exists to allow every number describing a character to have a fixed, standardized meaning, so that you can send text around independently of the fonts. Instead of fighting for the same 256 codes, there are now over a million possible codes, and fonts declare which code ranges they know how to draw. As a result, you don't have to worry about mixing alphabets and graphics in text anymore - worst that can happen is that something will get rendered as a placeholder. But it won't get rendered as a wrong symbol. -- [0] - Well, strongly simplifying. In reality, the "picture" can be anything from a bitmap, a set of bitmaps, a vector image, or executable code; the mapping part can also be executable code. A prime example of "code is data" :). Simple devices like thermal printers might accept only a trivial byte-to-bitmap mapping (aka. "bitmap fonts"). More complex ones will work with modern fonts, which are essentially programs that interpret text and produce instructions to draw it. Pushed to extreme, you get things like a videogame inside a font[1], or a font that automatically translates startup marketing copy into plain English[2]. [1] - https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html [2] - https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/
deskamess 6y ago
Glad that the language is something I cannot read. It was fun trying to interpret the icons and coming to a realization that either I or the images are too obtuse. What does an extra line added to an already existing icon mean?
- eMSF 6y ago
  The underlines mean gentle (and very gentle) as explained in the table at the top (see TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL COMBINING BAR BELOW etc.)
  - deskamess 6y ago
    Ah... thanks!
- bsdubernerd 6y ago
  Same here. I intuitively understand some of them, others I know because I had to look up to before, but otherwise I also consider most of them obtuse. I guess the main point is that they're already standardized.
dale_glass 6y ago
There's some surprising absences in unicode. For instance, while messing around with setting up the i3/Sway bar, I couldn't find symbols for: * WiFi. Really. There's U+1F4F6, but it's not exactly the right thing. * Anything to indicate CPU usage, like some sort of microprocessor chip. * Anything to indicate RAM usage. This is curious because for instance U+1F50A and U+1F507 exist, so you'd expect to have a set of such generally useful icons. Plus, it's computer tech. The lack of computer related stuff is odd, given that there's no lack of many things I have no idea what they're good for, such as U+1F574 ("Man in business suit levitating") Edit: would be nice to have unicode support on here. Seems it gets stripped.
- legulere 6y ago
  It’s not so surprising considering Unicode is about text, not about symbols.
  - dale_glass 6y ago
    There's plenty symbols in it. For instance: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous_symbols_and_pictographs/images.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous...
  - saint-loup 6y ago
    There are various Unicode blocks dedicated to symbols. There are cartography symbols, domino tiles, alchemical symbols... There is even a block for "legacy computing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block#List_of_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block#List_of_blocks
    - OskarS 6y ago
      My of these is the block dedicated to western musical notation.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Text is symbols. And Unicode in particular has loads of non-letter symbols in it. It's only natural, given that a lot of these often show up in line with regular letters. Think of various paper documents you read, like instruction manuals, which make heavy use of non-letter glyphs in text.
yccs27 6y ago
I guess this poses the question: Is there a clear boundary between text and icons? And in which cases should icons be handled like characters? Plain symbols within text clearly belong in a font. Logos, on the other hand, are images, not characters. Icon fonts, which are somewhere in between, became popular for webdesign but seem to be falling out of favor again. What is the current "best practice" here?
- willvarfar 6y ago
  Things like laundry labels are an international language. They are understood (or not) irregardless of country and written language.
  - lifthrasiir 6y ago
    To be clear laundry labels are candidates to become an international language. They are currently not.
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      There is no entity that can decree something an international language or otherwise, even if an entity were arrogant enough to claim that it could do so.
  - falcor84 6y ago
    I'll just add a meta comment that `understood (or not) irregardless` is the most value-ambiguous utterance I've read in a long while; quite clear to me what you meant, but probably would be quite a 'head scratcher' for an AI.
- kijin 6y ago
  Many writing systems evolved from what we might consider icons. The letter A comes from the head of an ox, which becomes much more obvious if you put it upside down like ∀. Many Chinese characters retain a similarity to the objects they represent: "tree" is 木 and "fire" is 火 (imagine a bonfire). The Korean consonants ㄱ and ㄴ represent the general position and shape of your tongue when you make the "k" and "n" sounds, respectively. All of these symbols began their life as icons, but were later recognized as text as people converged on a certain usage.
tremon 6y ago
This is more useful than some other recent additions, I'd say. It's somewhat surprising that this hasn't been included before, but maybe that's because this was standardized well before Unicode came to be.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  There was an attempt to add these to unicode in the mid 00s, and it failed for the same reason this will: GINETEX won't grant the trademark license, because then they'd no longer be able to ensure that whoever has the rights to use the symbols is using them correctly.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Standard Textile Care Symbols? There is an actual standard for that? It's a serious question. As far as I can tell, going by my wardrobe, there isn't. It's always been one of the minor annoyances in my life - clothing and clothing-adjacent vendors put these icons on their products, and I have no first clue what they mean, because which family of signs is used seems to depend on some combination of country of origin, target market, and the position of Saturn relative to Jupiter.
- zinekeller 6y ago
  Where are you from? Serious question, since Europe do tend to have standard symbols for nearly everything due to cross-border (and cross-cultural) differences, while this is meh (why? we have English!) to North America.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Poland, EU. I remember doing some Internet searches for this over a decade ago, back when I started doing my own laundry :). Maybe I didn't look thoroughly enough - but between that search and the actual labels on the clothes I had, I saw no indication of a standard. Might be because my clothes were probably a mix of branded things sold on EU market, and (mostly) unbranded ones I bought on a bazaar, which could've been imported from Turkey or East Asia.
    - zinekeller 6y ago
      Makes sense since it was over a decade ago. US and Asian textile care symbols were a bad mess (differs from brand to brand) back then (while ISO sensibly implemented the then-EN standard because they were the same across brands).
  - AnssiH 6y ago
    I believe this regional symbols vs. text difference can also be seen in many washing machines - it is quite common to have symbols for the knobs and settings here (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/7yRzT https://imgur.com/a/7yRzT), while I've understood that this isn't common in e.g. US. Though I thought textile care symbols are common in US as well, or at least I think all my US-bought clothes have them too. So this is probably not one of those US-Europe differences.
superasn 6y ago
Little related but saw a nice documentary(1) called "Have you ever heard of the "Emoji Commission"? | DW Documentary" where a lady became a passive member by buying a $20K ticket or something to get a dumpling emoji added (IIRC it was sometime ago). If you have time to kill, it's super interesting on how they decide which emojis to add. (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9L27V337E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9L27V337E
bluenose69 6y ago
I always wondered what those weird symbols on my clothes were for. And why everything shrank, wrinkled, or changed colour.
TTT1 6y ago
hey
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
KaiserPro 6y ago
I don't think this will work because it is my understanding that these symbols are copyrighted and require a fee for use in garments. https://www.ginetex.net/userfiles/files/Textile_care_symbols_en.pdf https://www.ginetex.net/userfiles/files/Textile_care_symbols...
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  Yes, that's a main reason why Korea and Japan (used to) have their own laundry symbols (KS K 0021 and JIS L 0217 respectively). Japan recently switched to ISO 3758 to match with China, which had switched from its own symbol much earlier though.
  - myspy 6y ago
    So if there is an ISO 3758 norm, does that mean the symbols there are copyrighted by Ginetex? The symbols almost look the same as far as I can see.
    - lifthrasiir 6y ago
      They are identical (AFAIK). Being a standard doesn't mean its original copyrights or licensing requiements have been waived.
- myspy 6y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that. Crazy that it's in the hand of one entity.
- bloak 6y ago
  Interesting... The document you linked to says they are "protected under trademark law", not copyright. I would guess they are "certification marks", which are a bit different from a normal trade mark like "Apple" or whatever. Their web site says: "GINETEX IS AN INDEPENDENT NON-PROFIT ASSOCIATION UNDER FRENCH LAW". So I would hope the fees are not exorbitant. But who knows? It's an independent organisation. If it did turn evil, would the French government intervene?
- 6y ago
xvilka 6y ago
For me it was always annoying that Unicode doesn't allow to code full set of subscripts/superscripts. It's so obvious and more necessary than many emojis they added recently.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  Unicode subscripts and superscripts mainly exist because of IPA. They are not general ways to encode arbitrary sub/superscripts as it would require too many letters to be encoded.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    They could just add a subscript and superscript modifier.
    - pdpi 6y ago
      Superscripts are a typesetting concern, not an encoding concern.
      - kevincox 6y ago
        If they change the semantic meaning of the text is that not under Unicode's purview?
        Sniffnoy 6y ago
        Italics change the semantic meaning of text too, but they're still rich text, not plaintext. Unicode has been generally taken the attitude that Unicode is for plaintext, not rich text, even if it's stretched the meaning of that a bit. (There's also the time they goofed up and added interlinear annotation, which is pretty clearly not plaintext, but they've since discouraged the use of that and I don't think they want to make any more mistakes like that.)
        kevincox 6y ago
securingsincity 6y ago
I got interested with these symbols when my son was born and I was doing all of our laundry what seemed like all hours of the day. So it was a good opportunity to play with machine learning and vision edge by gcp. Ended up building a pair of apps for iOS and android that can identify the symbols https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible-with-machine-learning/ https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible...
- wwwhizz 6y ago
  I ended up washing everything on 40 degrees and throwing everything in the dryer. Works just fine.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Ish. Dryers can literally melt heavily-synthetic clothes. Been there, done that.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Turn the temperature down. You shouldn't dry anything that hot, it just wastes energy.
      - anamexis 6y ago
        I can certainly see other reasons to not run the dryer so hot, but why would it waste energy?
        BrianOnHN 6y ago
        The hotter the coils the higher the amount of energy that's required to maintain it.
        anamexis 6y ago
        Well yes, but also the faster it dries your clothes and shuts off.
agumonkey 6y ago
Interesting, what other stand iconology is present in unicode ? general safety ? road safety ? chemistry ?
- grose 6y ago
  How about alchemy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_Symbols_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_Symbols_(Unicode_bl...
globular-toast 6y ago
Unicode is supposed to encode writing. These are not part of any writing system I'm aware of. If Unicode adds these, that steps over the line from being descriptive (ie. this is writing actually in use), to prescriptive (ie. these should be treated as writing). Maybe that boat already sailed with emojis, though. I think the main motivation for stuff like this is for people to feel good about having an impact on something like Unicode. I fail to see how this adds any value to Unicode.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Not a bad idea, but there’s dozens of other ISO symbols that I think should also be considered[0]. Some are quite important; like safety symbols. One of my pet peeves has always been the difference between US emergency egress (“EXIT” signs), and everyone else in the world. In the US, they tend to be red, and the word “EXIT”. Everyone else does green, with the man running through the door. In Japan, medical facilities were denoted by a green cross. In the US, it tends to be blue or red. Color can be an important factor, but that’s tangential to the Unicode set. [0] https://www.iso.org/news/2013/10/Ref1787.html https://www.iso.org/news/2013/10/Ref1787.html
- 0_____0 6y ago
  I'm chuckling at the idea of a Japanese person trying to find medical care in San Francisco and walking into a weed dispensary by mistake
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    They use green crosses? (I live in NY, so I wouldn't know). Yeah, that could be interesting. I do know a lot of folks that think of weed/CBD as "Doc Stanley's Magic Elixir."
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      In Colorado as well. I think it's become the de facto dispensary indicator in a lot of areas of the US.
- seszett 6y ago
  In Belgium at least the colour of crosses has a meaning: green for pharmacies, red for doctors and blue for veterinarians. In France I've only really seen the green one for pharmacies but maybe I didn't pay attention.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I'll have to pay attention. Veterinarians don't seem to have any color code, that I know of. Many don't use crosses (they tend to have cutsey animals). The hospital near where I live has a blue cross at its emergency entrance, and a nearby urgent care clinic also has a blue cross, however, another nearby urgent care facility has a red cross. I don't know of any pharmacies that have any prominent cross displays. They tend to have their own branding (which may or may not have a cross integrated).
tarsinge 6y ago
In the meantime, still no external link symbol.
fjfaase 6y ago
I wonder what the purpose is of adding more and more symbols to a standard that was originally intended to represent texts in written languages. It almost feels like it is the easy part of 'improving' the standard: Adding more symbols, while at the same time there are still many problems with missing characters for existing character sets. https://www.w3.org/International/articles/missing-char-glyph/index.en https://www.w3.org/International/articles/missing-char-glyph...
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  The document was last updated in 2003. Nowadays Unicode provides a solution to the gaiji problem: the Ideographic Variation Database [1]. For unencoded Han characters using Ideographic Description Sequences as ligatures is now quite viable. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/ https://unicode.org/ivd/
fassssst 6y ago
Why don’t laundry machines themselves use these symbols? How do I know what “hot” vs “warm” is in degrees?
stuaxo 6y ago
Surprising these aren't already a part of unicode.
maelito 6y ago
Related : I've started to draw new emojis depicting the environment and energy subjects. As I don't think they would make it in the unicode standards soon, I've found the openmoji project very nice, it lets developers and designers use meanwhile. https://github.com/laem/openmoji-environment https://github.com/laem/openmoji-environment
cyberlab 6y ago
There's more proposals here: https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/ https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/ There's a rather whimsical one proposed called the Priest Emoji! https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/425 https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/425 Instead of having proposals, why not just implement every thing/subject/object/symbol we can think of?
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  Because there can only be 17×2^16 – 2048 – 66 = 1,111,998 unicode code points. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible-unicode-characters/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible... Of course that limitation is artificial, due to compatibility with UTF-16 and UCS-2. So Microsoft would likely block such a proposal, since they'd have to change how Windows does character encoding.
quelsolaar 6y ago
Unicode is a secret moat for the large tech companies. The more crap they add, the harder it is for anyone who starts fresh to catch up. For every new emoticon, that teenagers expect to have, the chance they have more platform choices diminishes. Standards like these should not exist, unless the standard body also provides a free conformant reference implementation.
- baggy_trough 6y ago
  "should not exist" is pretty strong. Unicode is a great improvement over what came before.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Is your life really improved by having access to <tilted heart face>? Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We’ve completely eliminated most of the advantages it might have held in the first place, like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. “Zero width joiners” should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5 diacritic-induced crashes). It’s fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously be handled by a generalized vector graphics format. Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips emoji from the post text!
- fastball 6y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. I use Unicode in my startup – what exactly do I need to catch up on?
  - quelsolaar 6y ago
    (Not knowing your startup ill make loads of assumptions here, sorry if I get it wrong) If you are drawing Unicode characters that include a full range of Emoticons, you are most likely using a platform API provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft or similar. You, like most developers, most likely live in "Big-tech land", so you get this for "free". If you want to port your application to an open source platform or a new upstart platform, where this isn't available, they may not have the resources to draw thousands of Emoticons, so its harder for them to attract you as a developer. Lets say someone is writing a SMS app for something like a PinePhone. SMS is open enough protocol that this is possible. The UI for a chat app is something you can build in fairly short order. There are plenty of open fonts, you can use, but there are no open fonts that have thousands of detailed and sometimes animated Emoticons. Without Emoticons very few people are going to want to use a PinePhone as their main communications device. The amount of effort needed to implement a SMS chat vs a SMS chat + draw all emoticons people use is massive. Unicode, and SMS are both open, but given the size of the Unicode Spec, its effectively shutting out any small player form implementing it. Big tech gets to claim they use open standards, but at the same time make sure no one can threaten them. Its a bit like when Microsoft tried to make a standard for documents so complicated that only word could implement it.
Techasura 6y ago
Absolutely support this for many reasons.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simias 6y ago
I always thought that unicode opened pandora's box with emojis. It makes sense to represent those that already existed in previous encodings for compatibility (it is meant to be universal, after all), but beyond that it's just a minefield IMO. In particular a big annoyance with emojis is that their representation varies a lot from device to device or even from application to application. You can expect that a B or a Ф will be recognizable in any non-windings font, but many emojis look different enough to the point of changing pretty drastically their semantics. I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format. Some kind of restricted SVG-like dialect that would be handled correctly by all unicode parsers and look the same everywhere. This way anybody could design their own application specific icons and emojis, you could either allow free-form emojis or only whitelist site-approved variants. Think something like fontawesome, but it'd work anywhere you can put unicode text. Sure, it would significantly increase the size of the text but is it usually a big problem? It would compress very well, and in my experience text storage is pretty negligible these days in most applications compared to images and videos. Instead it seems that we need to allocate codepoints and ask people to create fonts for textile care symbols, and national dishes, and all sorts of sports, and...
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  > I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format. Unicode folks are also feeling this pain and there have been multiple attempts to decouple the emoji business from Unicode: the closest to what you've described is the Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images [1]. (The proposed encoding is wasteful but of course would have been improved if it were accepted.) Considering that the Unicode consortium is a consortium of vendors, this emoji business is suboptimal even for vendors. But there seems no particularly good way to efficiently and securely implement such mechanisms. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.p...
  - bdowling 6y ago
    Interesting. Apparently TR-52 allows for arbitrarily long strings of tag values for emoji variants. So the standard could, theoretically anyway, allow an emoji variant that includes an entire PNG or SVG.
AceJohnny2 6y ago
Fun fact: Unicode can not have 2^32 symbols, but 0x10FFFF (1,114,111) split across 17 "Code Planes" due, apparently, to the limitations of UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Architecture_and_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Architecture_and_termi... https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible-unicode-characters/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible...
WalterBright 6y ago
The next generation of children will have to suffer through learning thousands of icons rather than 26 letters.
WalterBright 6y ago
Here's a test: how many of those icons can you correctly identify without reading the accompanying explanation? I.e. use words instead. Words work just fine. Words can be looked up in a dictionary (or just type them into google). Good luck googling a scribble.
- sedatk 6y ago
  Good luck googling Chinese text? Symbols don't require localization, and they're a very small and simple subset compared to a whole language. Even illiterate can learn them, and literacy rates can go down as low as 30% in some countries.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    So use English. Even illiterates can learn 5 or 6 English words as well or better than they can learn icons. These words also transfer to learning English in general, while laundry icons are worthless knowledge.
    - sedatk 6y ago
      How is English a cure to that problem? How will Chinese google English words?
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        > How will Chinese google English words? Type them into Google's search box.
- mtrower 6y ago
  > Here's a test: how many of those icons can you correctly identify without reading the accompanying explanation? Well, funny thing --- the explanations on TFA are all in a language I can't read, so the words that "work just fine" mean less to me than a lot of those symbols do. But, the answer to your question is "35". > Good luck googling a scribble. Reverse image search? Google in fact provides just such a service. Realistically though, this is how you google a laundry symbol: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laundry+symbols&t=ffsb&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laundry+symbols&t=ffsb&ia=web You seem quite upset about this subject, but I'm not really seeing what's got you up in arms. These symbols have been used for ages now. Check any laundry garment you own. Having them included in Unicode (rather than forcing the use of some specialized font) isn't going to make them suddenly show up more places in physical print (and, conversely, keeping them out of Unicode will not make them go away). On the other hand, if you're encountering them digitally (as Unicode), you can just copy/paste the glyph to search for it. It's literally implemented as text at that point. > Words can be looked up in a dictionary Why on earth is is acceptable to pull a dictionary off the shelf and page through it (or load up dictionary software, etc.), but not okay to consult a laundry reference (digital or otherwise; if digital, almost certainly found through Google)?
cletus 6y ago
It seems like the Unicode Symposium has engaged in a massive employment program for itself with a mission that will continue into perpetuity. Obviously ASCII was insufficient as it only really had Latin characters. Providing a standard interchange for the world's languages is a noble goal. But then (IMHO) Unicode went completely off the rails by trying to create a code point for every imagine symbol, including emoji. And now I guess textile care symbols. All the while, it's missing (at least as of 2015) key characters in living languages [1], engaged in the highly controversial Han Unification [2] (interestingly, there are Latin/Cyrilic and other duplicates that there is no attempt to "unify" [3]) and implemented Unicode code point modifiers. Emoji, in particular, seems to be a huge mistake (IMHO). Like... it's going to be constantly changing. What's wrong with hierarchical approaches that we've used for things like DNS? Create a Unicode code point for "emoji" and then the next code point is a completely different standard. The goal of creating a code point for everything just seems... wrong. We already have >1M code points. In 100 years at this rate we're going to have 1B+ code points where 99.99% of them are never used. Why can't we just solve the problem of expressing written languages and keep the rest to a different space? [1]: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#:~:text=Han%20unification%20is%20an%20effort,single%20set%20of%20unified%20characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#:~:text=Han%20.... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicod...
- astrange 6y ago
  It is not true that every emoji is a single codepoint - for instance the flags are country code strings and there are many other cases. The original set were separate characters because they were imported from a different standard. Nobody really cares about Han unification either. It's fine, especially since you can use variation selectors or specify the text language to get appropriate fonts. Now I'm curious because Wikipedia mentions the Han group has "experts from North Korea"…
- andrepd 6y ago
  I'd argue that textile care symbols are part of "written language", just as mathematical symbols or typographical marks for example, which exist in Unicode. Emoji... not so much
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
utf_8x 6y ago
Why the hell not... Unicode already has thousands of symbols, unlike many these might actually be useful.

Is it time to admit that simply storing everything as an image is the future? Sure, it isn't technically as neat, but it gives far more flexibility. It happens already in memes (where text is usually part of a gif) Text and text encoding dates back from the days when every byte of storage space mattered. Now lossless high resolution images are the norm, and wouldn't constrain what symbols could be included. If you want to make a word be slightly bendy for style, you can! Accessibility, relayout, etc. can all be done with images too - you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago
Fonts are a standard and cross-platform way to bundle vector images. Now if we only had some way to figure out which image in the bundle corresponds to what... Maybe some encoding scheme where we assign a numeric ID to each image? (Oh wait...)
Hackbraten 6y ago
I strongly disagree. - You can copy a text symbol and put it into a search engine to figure out what it means. - Screen readers can recognize text symbols without needing an alt text. - Text is more flexible on dark or light backgrounds and has better contrast. - Text is better suited for virtual keyboards and auto-correct or auto-replacement. - Text can be used in input fields. - Text has native rendering hints built-in, such as baseline and kerning, which improves inline rendering. - Text is more flexible when choosing a glyph. For example, you can render it larger for the visually impaired, or change fonts and put a special glyph into the font. - Text is more flexible when choosing color vs. black-and-white output. Try printing an emoji to see what I mean.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Tooling could be built to do all of that for images too. For example you could take part of an image and put it into a search engine too... That search engine would take images as input, and where the image represents writing if some kind, it would return relevant results. Screen readers could look into an image and read out any writing found, just like some screen readers can describe an image ("person in boat holding flag"). Deep nets that can do this reasonably well have been around years now.
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    The tooling for doing all that with images is called a font.
  - visarga 6y ago
    You can do all that but you'd have to use a neural net instead of "find..." Neural nets make plenty of errors, including on OCR (at least 2-4%).
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    Find my girlfriend a dress that doesn't need ironing. Easy if there's a "do not iron" symbol in text to search. Much harder to grep if it's an image.
shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago
How would the software that lets me add text to images work? Presumably it would use unicode. And how would the software that extracts text from an image store the extracted text? If it comes accross a number of symbols from different domains how would it save them, and what table of contents would it use as a reference? Unicode.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  But that's an implementation detail - some software might let you hand write text into an image with a brush or pen, and that might use as its internal representation the X,Y coordinates of the brush strokes.
  - shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago
    So then how will the software convert the X,Y coordinates into text that is read out to a screen reader? I think many of the other comments put it more eloquently than I can.
yccs27 6y ago
you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image. Then you still need some way to handle text, and image to text is not reliable. Text simply has so much more distilled information. Images are nice for humans, but I can't imagine them as a storage format for programs.
Retr0spectrum 6y ago
you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image. This is extremely non-simple. It is a strictly harder problem than just... encoding image+text in a sane container format like HTML or SVG.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  But with various AI/ML approaches it's now becoming pretty straightforward. And lots of new hardware has ML acceleration.
  - Retr0spectrum 6y ago
    So we train an ML model to convert images to text. How do we encode that text information?
    - j16sdiz 6y ago
      Hyper Textile Markup Language, of course.
jstimpfle 6y ago
This is the most absurd thing I've heard this month. The page you are looking at right now is in fact an image that your computer put on screen. However, that fact does not help you when you want to reply to my comment. Or more generally, if you want to edit, transform, store, compress, search. I can easily search 1GB of text on my computer for a specific pattern. I could not even store all that information directly encoded as (say) raster or vector graphics.

thecopy 6y ago

What problem is this solving?

Ensorceled 6y ago
Printing of textile care labels ... that are on all of your garments, towels and bedclothes.
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  I wonder how they did it before.
  - practice9 6y ago
    By using custom fonts?
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    In a complicated manner. Really, why is this a problem for people on HN? I'm hoping it's not what I think it is.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    I wonder how they did mathematical symbols before. I wonder how they did arrows before. I wonder how they did musical symbols before. I wonder how they did typesetting markers before. I wonder how they did braille before.
  - tremon 6y ago
    It's on the linked page: Wash Care Symbols M54 The font Wash Care Symbols M54 has already implemented textile care symbols. However, they are encoded in the C0 Controls and Basic Latin block.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Using different fonts. A font is just[0] a table that maps numbers to pictures. A typical font will map a number 65 to a picture of what we know as letter 'A' in Latin alphabet. But there's nothing preventing you from making a font that will contain, at index 65, a picture of a dog. Or a "hand washing" symbol. And this is what people did - both to support non-English alphabets in the era where "printable character" meant "7 bits", and to support mixing graphics with text (if you add that missing bit to make a full byte, you get 128 more codes to play with). Ultimately, screens and printers don't understand letters - they understand arrays of color values (or, occasionally, colors attached to parameters of a curve). Fonts are the intermediary, and you can draw anything with text if you supply the right font. The problem is though, if you had a custom mapping of characters to pictures, you had to ship it with your text, and make sure users know how to configure their software to use your specific font for your text. Unicode exists to allow every number describing a character to have a fixed, standardized meaning, so that you can send text around independently of the fonts. Instead of fighting for the same 256 codes, there are now over a million possible codes, and fonts declare which code ranges they know how to draw. As a result, you don't have to worry about mixing alphabets and graphics in text anymore - worst that can happen is that something will get rendered as a placeholder. But it won't get rendered as a wrong symbol. -- [0] - Well, strongly simplifying. In reality, the "picture" can be anything from a bitmap, a set of bitmaps, a vector image, or executable code; the mapping part can also be executable code. A prime example of "code is data" :). Simple devices like thermal printers might accept only a trivial byte-to-bitmap mapping (aka. "bitmap fonts"). More complex ones will work with modern fonts, which are essentially programs that interpret text and produce instructions to draw it. Pushed to extreme, you get things like a videogame inside a font[1], or a font that automatically translates startup marketing copy into plain English[2]. [1] - https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html [2] - https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

deskamess 6y ago

Glad that the language is something I cannot read. It was fun trying to interpret the icons and coming to a realization that either I or the images are too obtuse. What does an extra line added to an already existing icon mean?

eMSF 6y ago
The underlines mean gentle (and very gentle) as explained in the table at the top (see TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL COMBINING BAR BELOW etc.)
- deskamess 6y ago
  Ah... thanks!
bsdubernerd 6y ago
Same here. I intuitively understand some of them, others I know because I had to look up to before, but otherwise I also consider most of them obtuse. I guess the main point is that they're already standardized.

dale_glass 6y ago

There's some surprising absences in unicode. For instance, while messing around with setting up the i3/Sway bar, I couldn't find symbols for: * WiFi. Really. There's U+1F4F6, but it's not exactly the right thing. * Anything to indicate CPU usage, like some sort of microprocessor chip. * Anything to indicate RAM usage. This is curious because for instance U+1F50A and U+1F507 exist, so you'd expect to have a set of such generally useful icons. Plus, it's computer tech. The lack of computer related stuff is odd, given that there's no lack of many things I have no idea what they're good for, such as U+1F574 ("Man in business suit levitating") Edit: would be nice to have unicode support on here. Seems it gets stripped.

legulere 6y ago
It’s not so surprising considering Unicode is about text, not about symbols.
- dale_glass 6y ago
  There's plenty symbols in it. For instance: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous_symbols_and_pictographs/images.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous...
- saint-loup 6y ago
  There are various Unicode blocks dedicated to symbols. There are cartography symbols, domino tiles, alchemical symbols... There is even a block for "legacy computing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block#List_of_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block#List_of_blocks
  - OskarS 6y ago
    My of these is the block dedicated to western musical notation.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Text is symbols. And Unicode in particular has loads of non-letter symbols in it. It's only natural, given that a lot of these often show up in line with regular letters. Think of various paper documents you read, like instruction manuals, which make heavy use of non-letter glyphs in text.

yccs27 6y ago

I guess this poses the question: Is there a clear boundary between text and icons? And in which cases should icons be handled like characters? Plain symbols within text clearly belong in a font. Logos, on the other hand, are images, not characters. Icon fonts, which are somewhere in between, became popular for webdesign but seem to be falling out of favor again. What is the current "best practice" here?

willvarfar 6y ago
Things like laundry labels are an international language. They are understood (or not) irregardless of country and written language.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  To be clear laundry labels are candidates to become an international language. They are currently not.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    There is no entity that can decree something an international language or otherwise, even if an entity were arrogant enough to claim that it could do so.
- falcor84 6y ago
  I'll just add a meta comment that `understood (or not) irregardless` is the most value-ambiguous utterance I've read in a long while; quite clear to me what you meant, but probably would be quite a 'head scratcher' for an AI.
kijin 6y ago
Many writing systems evolved from what we might consider icons. The letter A comes from the head of an ox, which becomes much more obvious if you put it upside down like ∀. Many Chinese characters retain a similarity to the objects they represent: "tree" is 木 and "fire" is 火 (imagine a bonfire). The Korean consonants ㄱ and ㄴ represent the general position and shape of your tongue when you make the "k" and "n" sounds, respectively. All of these symbols began their life as icons, but were later recognized as text as people converged on a certain usage.

tremon 6y ago

This is more useful than some other recent additions, I'd say. It's somewhat surprising that this hasn't been included before, but maybe that's because this was standardized well before Unicode came to be.

hannasanarion 6y ago
There was an attempt to add these to unicode in the mid 00s, and it failed for the same reason this will: GINETEX won't grant the trademark license, because then they'd no longer be able to ensure that whoever has the rights to use the symbols is using them correctly.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Standard Textile Care Symbols? There is an actual standard for that? It's a serious question. As far as I can tell, going by my wardrobe, there isn't. It's always been one of the minor annoyances in my life - clothing and clothing-adjacent vendors put these icons on their products, and I have no first clue what they mean, because which family of signs is used seems to depend on some combination of country of origin, target market, and the position of Saturn relative to Jupiter.

zinekeller 6y ago
Where are you from? Serious question, since Europe do tend to have standard symbols for nearly everything due to cross-border (and cross-cultural) differences, while this is meh (why? we have English!) to North America.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Poland, EU. I remember doing some Internet searches for this over a decade ago, back when I started doing my own laundry :). Maybe I didn't look thoroughly enough - but between that search and the actual labels on the clothes I had, I saw no indication of a standard. Might be because my clothes were probably a mix of branded things sold on EU market, and (mostly) unbranded ones I bought on a bazaar, which could've been imported from Turkey or East Asia.
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    Makes sense since it was over a decade ago. US and Asian textile care symbols were a bad mess (differs from brand to brand) back then (while ISO sensibly implemented the then-EN standard because they were the same across brands).
- AnssiH 6y ago
  I believe this regional symbols vs. text difference can also be seen in many washing machines - it is quite common to have symbols for the knobs and settings here (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/7yRzT https://imgur.com/a/7yRzT), while I've understood that this isn't common in e.g. US. Though I thought textile care symbols are common in US as well, or at least I think all my US-bought clothes have them too. So this is probably not one of those US-Europe differences.

superasn 6y ago

Little related but saw a nice documentary(1) called "Have you ever heard of the "Emoji Commission"? | DW Documentary" where a lady became a passive member by buying a $20K ticket or something to get a dumpling emoji added (IIRC it was sometime ago). If you have time to kill, it's super interesting on how they decide which emojis to add. (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9L27V337E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9L27V337E

bluenose69 6y ago

I always wondered what those weird symbols on my clothes were for. And why everything shrank, wrinkled, or changed colour.

TTT1 6y ago

hey

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

KaiserPro 6y ago

I don't think this will work because it is my understanding that these symbols are copyrighted and require a fee for use in garments. https://www.ginetex.net/userfiles/files/Textile_care_symbols_en.pdf https://www.ginetex.net/userfiles/files/Textile_care_symbols...

lifthrasiir 6y ago
Yes, that's a main reason why Korea and Japan (used to) have their own laundry symbols (KS K 0021 and JIS L 0217 respectively). Japan recently switched to ISO 3758 to match with China, which had switched from its own symbol much earlier though.
- myspy 6y ago
  So if there is an ISO 3758 norm, does that mean the symbols there are copyrighted by Ginetex? The symbols almost look the same as far as I can see.
  - lifthrasiir 6y ago
    They are identical (AFAIK). Being a standard doesn't mean its original copyrights or licensing requiements have been waived.
myspy 6y ago
Interesting, I didn't know that. Crazy that it's in the hand of one entity.
bloak 6y ago
Interesting... The document you linked to says they are "protected under trademark law", not copyright. I would guess they are "certification marks", which are a bit different from a normal trade mark like "Apple" or whatever. Their web site says: "GINETEX IS AN INDEPENDENT NON-PROFIT ASSOCIATION UNDER FRENCH LAW". So I would hope the fees are not exorbitant. But who knows? It's an independent organisation. If it did turn evil, would the French government intervene?
6y ago

xvilka 6y ago

For me it was always annoying that Unicode doesn't allow to code full set of subscripts/superscripts. It's so obvious and more necessary than many emojis they added recently.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
Unicode subscripts and superscripts mainly exist because of IPA. They are not general ways to encode arbitrary sub/superscripts as it would require too many letters to be encoded.
- kevincox 6y ago
  They could just add a subscript and superscript modifier.
  - pdpi 6y ago
    Superscripts are a typesetting concern, not an encoding concern.
    - kevincox 6y ago
      If they change the semantic meaning of the text is that not under Unicode's purview?
      - Sniffnoy 6y ago
        Italics change the semantic meaning of text too, but they're still rich text, not plaintext. Unicode has been generally taken the attitude that Unicode is for plaintext, not rich text, even if it's stretched the meaning of that a bit. (There's also the time they goofed up and added interlinear annotation, which is pretty clearly not plaintext, but they've since discouraged the use of that and I don't think they want to make any more mistakes like that.)
        kevincox 6y ago

securingsincity 6y ago

I got interested with these symbols when my son was born and I was doing all of our laundry what seemed like all hours of the day. So it was a good opportunity to play with machine learning and vision edge by gcp. Ended up building a pair of apps for iOS and android that can identify the symbols https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible-with-machine-learning/ https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible...

wwwhizz 6y ago
I ended up washing everything on 40 degrees and throwing everything in the dryer. Works just fine.
- toyg 6y ago
  Ish. Dryers can literally melt heavily-synthetic clothes. Been there, done that.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Turn the temperature down. You shouldn't dry anything that hot, it just wastes energy.
    - anamexis 6y ago
      I can certainly see other reasons to not run the dryer so hot, but why would it waste energy?
      - BrianOnHN 6y ago
        The hotter the coils the higher the amount of energy that's required to maintain it.
        anamexis 6y ago
        Well yes, but also the faster it dries your clothes and shuts off.

agumonkey 6y ago

Interesting, what other stand iconology is present in unicode ? general safety ? road safety ? chemistry ?

grose 6y ago
How about alchemy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_Symbols_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_Symbols_(Unicode_bl...

globular-toast 6y ago

Unicode is supposed to encode writing. These are not part of any writing system I'm aware of. If Unicode adds these, that steps over the line from being descriptive (ie. this is writing actually in use), to prescriptive (ie. these should be treated as writing). Maybe that boat already sailed with emojis, though. I think the main motivation for stuff like this is for people to feel good about having an impact on something like Unicode. I fail to see how this adds any value to Unicode.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Not a bad idea, but there’s dozens of other ISO symbols that I think should also be considered[0]. Some are quite important; like safety symbols. One of my pet peeves has always been the difference between US emergency egress (“EXIT” signs), and everyone else in the world. In the US, they tend to be red, and the word “EXIT”. Everyone else does green, with the man running through the door. In Japan, medical facilities were denoted by a green cross. In the US, it tends to be blue or red. Color can be an important factor, but that’s tangential to the Unicode set. [0] https://www.iso.org/news/2013/10/Ref1787.html https://www.iso.org/news/2013/10/Ref1787.html

0_____0 6y ago
I'm chuckling at the idea of a Japanese person trying to find medical care in San Francisco and walking into a weed dispensary by mistake
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  They use green crosses? (I live in NY, so I wouldn't know). Yeah, that could be interesting. I do know a lot of folks that think of weed/CBD as "Doc Stanley's Magic Elixir."
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    In Colorado as well. I think it's become the de facto dispensary indicator in a lot of areas of the US.
seszett 6y ago
In Belgium at least the colour of crosses has a meaning: green for pharmacies, red for doctors and blue for veterinarians. In France I've only really seen the green one for pharmacies but maybe I didn't pay attention.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I'll have to pay attention. Veterinarians don't seem to have any color code, that I know of. Many don't use crosses (they tend to have cutsey animals). The hospital near where I live has a blue cross at its emergency entrance, and a nearby urgent care clinic also has a blue cross, however, another nearby urgent care facility has a red cross. I don't know of any pharmacies that have any prominent cross displays. They tend to have their own branding (which may or may not have a cross integrated).

tarsinge 6y ago

In the meantime, still no external link symbol.

fjfaase 6y ago

I wonder what the purpose is of adding more and more symbols to a standard that was originally intended to represent texts in written languages. It almost feels like it is the easy part of 'improving' the standard: Adding more symbols, while at the same time there are still many problems with missing characters for existing character sets. https://www.w3.org/International/articles/missing-char-glyph/index.en https://www.w3.org/International/articles/missing-char-glyph...

lifthrasiir 6y ago
The document was last updated in 2003. Nowadays Unicode provides a solution to the gaiji problem: the Ideographic Variation Database [1]. For unencoded Han characters using Ideographic Description Sequences as ligatures is now quite viable. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/ https://unicode.org/ivd/

fassssst 6y ago

Why don’t laundry machines themselves use these symbols? How do I know what “hot” vs “warm” is in degrees?

stuaxo 6y ago

Surprising these aren't already a part of unicode.

maelito 6y ago

Related : I've started to draw new emojis depicting the environment and energy subjects. As I don't think they would make it in the unicode standards soon, I've found the openmoji project very nice, it lets developers and designers use meanwhile. https://github.com/laem/openmoji-environment https://github.com/laem/openmoji-environment

cyberlab 6y ago

There's more proposals here: https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/ https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/ There's a rather whimsical one proposed called the Priest Emoji! https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/425 https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/425 Instead of having proposals, why not just implement every thing/subject/object/symbol we can think of?

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
Because there can only be 17×2^16 – 2048 – 66 = 1,111,998 unicode code points. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible-unicode-characters/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible... Of course that limitation is artificial, due to compatibility with UTF-16 and UCS-2. So Microsoft would likely block such a proposal, since they'd have to change how Windows does character encoding.

quelsolaar 6y ago

Unicode is a secret moat for the large tech companies. The more crap they add, the harder it is for anyone who starts fresh to catch up. For every new emoticon, that teenagers expect to have, the chance they have more platform choices diminishes. Standards like these should not exist, unless the standard body also provides a free conformant reference implementation.

baggy_trough 6y ago
"should not exist" is pretty strong. Unicode is a great improvement over what came before.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Is your life really improved by having access to <tilted heart face>? Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We’ve completely eliminated most of the advantages it might have held in the first place, like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. “Zero width joiners” should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5 diacritic-induced crashes). It’s fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously be handled by a generalized vector graphics format. Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips emoji from the post text!
fastball 6y ago
I'm not sure I follow. I use Unicode in my startup – what exactly do I need to catch up on?
- quelsolaar 6y ago
  (Not knowing your startup ill make loads of assumptions here, sorry if I get it wrong) If you are drawing Unicode characters that include a full range of Emoticons, you are most likely using a platform API provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft or similar. You, like most developers, most likely live in "Big-tech land", so you get this for "free". If you want to port your application to an open source platform or a new upstart platform, where this isn't available, they may not have the resources to draw thousands of Emoticons, so its harder for them to attract you as a developer. Lets say someone is writing a SMS app for something like a PinePhone. SMS is open enough protocol that this is possible. The UI for a chat app is something you can build in fairly short order. There are plenty of open fonts, you can use, but there are no open fonts that have thousands of detailed and sometimes animated Emoticons. Without Emoticons very few people are going to want to use a PinePhone as their main communications device. The amount of effort needed to implement a SMS chat vs a SMS chat + draw all emoticons people use is massive. Unicode, and SMS are both open, but given the size of the Unicode Spec, its effectively shutting out any small player form implementing it. Big tech gets to claim they use open standards, but at the same time make sure no one can threaten them. Its a bit like when Microsoft tried to make a standard for documents so complicated that only word could implement it.

Techasura 6y ago

Absolutely support this for many reasons.

deleted 6y ago

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simias 6y ago

I always thought that unicode opened pandora's box with emojis. It makes sense to represent those that already existed in previous encodings for compatibility (it is meant to be universal, after all), but beyond that it's just a minefield IMO. In particular a big annoyance with emojis is that their representation varies a lot from device to device or even from application to application. You can expect that a B or a Ф will be recognizable in any non-windings font, but many emojis look different enough to the point of changing pretty drastically their semantics. I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format. Some kind of restricted SVG-like dialect that would be handled correctly by all unicode parsers and look the same everywhere. This way anybody could design their own application specific icons and emojis, you could either allow free-form emojis or only whitelist site-approved variants. Think something like fontawesome, but it'd work anywhere you can put unicode text. Sure, it would significantly increase the size of the text but is it usually a big problem? It would compress very well, and in my experience text storage is pretty negligible these days in most applications compared to images and videos. Instead it seems that we need to allocate codepoints and ask people to create fonts for textile care symbols, and national dishes, and all sorts of sports, and...

lifthrasiir 6y ago
> I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format. Unicode folks are also feeling this pain and there have been multiple attempts to decouple the emoji business from Unicode: the closest to what you've described is the Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images [1]. (The proposed encoding is wasteful but of course would have been improved if it were accepted.) Considering that the Unicode consortium is a consortium of vendors, this emoji business is suboptimal even for vendors. But there seems no particularly good way to efficiently and securely implement such mechanisms. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.p...
- bdowling 6y ago
  Interesting. Apparently TR-52 allows for arbitrarily long strings of tag values for emoji variants. So the standard could, theoretically anyway, allow an emoji variant that includes an entire PNG or SVG.

AceJohnny2 6y ago

Fun fact: Unicode can not have 2^32 symbols, but 0x10FFFF (1,114,111) split across 17 "Code Planes" due, apparently, to the limitations of UTF-16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Architecture_and_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Architecture_and_termi... https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible-unicode-characters/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible...

WalterBright 6y ago

The next generation of children will have to suffer through learning thousands of icons rather than 26 letters.

WalterBright 6y ago

Here's a test: how many of those icons can you correctly identify without reading the accompanying explanation? I.e. use words instead. Words work just fine. Words can be looked up in a dictionary (or just type them into google). Good luck googling a scribble.

sedatk 6y ago
Good luck googling Chinese text? Symbols don't require localization, and they're a very small and simple subset compared to a whole language. Even illiterate can learn them, and literacy rates can go down as low as 30% in some countries.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  So use English. Even illiterates can learn 5 or 6 English words as well or better than they can learn icons. These words also transfer to learning English in general, while laundry icons are worthless knowledge.
  - sedatk 6y ago
    How is English a cure to that problem? How will Chinese google English words?
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      > How will Chinese google English words? Type them into Google's search box.
mtrower 6y ago
> Here's a test: how many of those icons can you correctly identify without reading the accompanying explanation? Well, funny thing --- the explanations on TFA are all in a language I can't read, so the words that "work just fine" mean less to me than a lot of those symbols do. But, the answer to your question is "35". > Good luck googling a scribble. Reverse image search? Google in fact provides just such a service. Realistically though, this is how you google a laundry symbol: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laundry+symbols&t=ffsb&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laundry+symbols&t=ffsb&ia=web You seem quite upset about this subject, but I'm not really seeing what's got you up in arms. These symbols have been used for ages now. Check any laundry garment you own. Having them included in Unicode (rather than forcing the use of some specialized font) isn't going to make them suddenly show up more places in physical print (and, conversely, keeping them out of Unicode will not make them go away). On the other hand, if you're encountering them digitally (as Unicode), you can just copy/paste the glyph to search for it. It's literally implemented as text at that point. > Words can be looked up in a dictionary Why on earth is is acceptable to pull a dictionary off the shelf and page through it (or load up dictionary software, etc.), but not okay to consult a laundry reference (digital or otherwise; if digital, almost certainly found through Google)?

cletus 6y ago

It seems like the Unicode Symposium has engaged in a massive employment program for itself with a mission that will continue into perpetuity. Obviously ASCII was insufficient as it only really had Latin characters. Providing a standard interchange for the world's languages is a noble goal. But then (IMHO) Unicode went completely off the rails by trying to create a code point for every imagine symbol, including emoji. And now I guess textile care symbols. All the while, it's missing (at least as of 2015) key characters in living languages [1], engaged in the highly controversial Han Unification [2] (interestingly, there are Latin/Cyrilic and other duplicates that there is no attempt to "unify" [3]) and implemented Unicode code point modifiers. Emoji, in particular, seems to be a huge mistake (IMHO). Like... it's going to be constantly changing. What's wrong with hierarchical approaches that we've used for things like DNS? Create a Unicode code point for "emoji" and then the next code point is a completely different standard. The goal of creating a code point for everything just seems... wrong. We already have >1M code points. In 100 years at this rate we're going to have 1B+ code points where 99.99% of them are never used. Why can't we just solve the problem of expressing written languages and keep the rest to a different space? [1]: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#:~:text=Han%20unification%20is%20an%20effort,single%20set%20of%20unified%20characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#:~:text=Han%20.... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicod...

astrange 6y ago
It is not true that every emoji is a single codepoint - for instance the flags are country code strings and there are many other cases. The original set were separate characters because they were imported from a different standard. Nobody really cares about Han unification either. It's fine, especially since you can use variation selectors or specify the text language to get appropriate fonts. Now I'm curious because Wikipedia mentions the Han group has "experts from North Korea"…
andrepd 6y ago
I'd argue that textile care symbols are part of "written language", just as mathematical symbols or typographical marks for example, which exist in Unicode. Emoji... not so much

deleted 6y ago

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utf_8x 6y ago

Why the hell not... Unicode already has thousands of symbols, unlike many these might actually be useful.