11 ms·
Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear
- adamrezich 5y agotruly hate how much additional complexity this emoji bullshit has added to unicode
- pkulak 5y agoI'm on Linux right now and, sadly, couldn't see the magic character properly. :( Anyone know if I'm missing anything, or is there no support for 13.1 yet? My standard routine is to just install every noto font I can find (noto-fonts noto-fonts-cjk noto-fonts-emoji noto-fonts-extra).
- xwx 5y agoIt works for me with Firefox on NixOS using Noto Color Emoji, from, I'm assuming, noto-fonts-emoji.
- littlestymaar 5y agoWorks here on a fresh (yesterday) Linux Mint install.
- merlinscholz 5y agoSame on fresh, stock openSUSE Tumbleweed with Gnome 40
- asciimike 5y agoThis reminds me of a blog post that I can no longer remember that discusses how Chinese is a lot of arranging several related kanji into a single character to express a new idea (please link it if you can find it). I would love to see unicode characters to allow for arbitrary combinations beyond those defined using just ZWJ to allow more flexibility (e.g. blizzard could be created by adding like "slowflake x 5" which creates a single character with five snowflakes, without having to create an entirely new character representing blizzard from snowflake + ZWJ + snowflake). As an aside, my favorite ZWJ magic is black flag + ZWJ + skull and crossbones = pirate flag. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols for more symbol language fun.
- Kronopath 5y agoI think you mean this article on “Yingzi”: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
- asciimike 5y agoYes! Thanks for the link :D
- alisonatwork 5y agoThe notion that Chinese characters describe ideas that are formed from smaller characters that also describe ideas is a nice story, but it's not really the case for the majority of Chinese characters. See the Wikipedia page, Principles of formation section[0]. Many Chinese characters are constructed with two parts of smaller characters, one of which can indicate a general concept while the other provides a vague pronunciation hint. This isn't really good enough to provide you with enough information to guess at either the meaning or the pronunciation if you don't already know the word, but if you do already know the word from spoken language, then the hints might be enough to recognize the character when you read it too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_of_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_...
- peterburkimsher 5y agoIf you'd like to decompose Chinese characters (e.g. if you're trying to use handwriting recognition and it's /almost/ right), try the Pingtype keyboard. Enter the character into the lower text box, and click Search. It'll decompose, and recompose characters based on the parts. I agree that the meaning is often hard to grasp from the glyphs, and can even be misleading. https://pingtype.github.io/ https://pingtype.github.io/
- rahimnathwani 5y agoRight, but there are still some nice examples, like: 木 = tree 森林 = forest And: 田 = field 力 = strength 男 = man (because he labours in the fields)
- amarshall 5y agoRelatedly, I’ve always rather enjoyed the talk “Love Hotels & Unicode”[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120404020043/http://www.reigndesign.com/blog/love-hotels-and-unicode/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120404020043/http://www.reignd...
- littlestymaar 5y agoOnly tangentially related, but it's a question that have bothered me for a while: Is there a reason why composite Math symbol aren't part of Unicode? Things like series, limits or integrals look like a really good fit for this kind of composition, and you could get rid of mathjax for 80% of its usage.
- neolog 5y agoThere is a proposal by the Julia language team https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal
- killenemy 5y agoEverybody, if you're a somebody in your field, please go sign this.
- 1-more 5y agoI gotta think it's because all the math you mention cannot render within a normal line height. That's not the end of the world for rendering, but maybe that counts as a bridge too far in Unicode? Or maybe it just boils down to "because it doesn't yet" and as soon as someone makes a good proposal it'll happen
- SilverRed 5y agoUnicode already has a bunch of things that extend the height like those "corrupted text" generators.
- 1-more 5y agoThose are a ton of combining accents put together. Crucially: they don't make the line any taller—that's what makes them so hard to read! An integral should be a little taller than the line height but you still want the integral's limits to be legible. Maybe I'm being too prescriptive; ∫₀¹𝑥 𝑑𝑥 would read ok if that 1 were stacked on top of the 0 without any other changes. My apologies if HN's formatter strips the special characters (edit: it didn't yay!): I wrote integral sign, subscript 0, superscript 1, math italic x, thin space, math italic d, math italic x. And maybe the idea is we should use words like "the integral from zero to one of x with respect to x." IDK.
- noway421 5y agoThis reminds me of a game I made! Matching emojis to produce the given emoji prompt. I didn't use any complex math tho, and my list of combinations is arbitrarily made by hand. https://emojibang.com/ https://emojibang.com/
- harimau777 5y agoThese kind of remind me of ligatures. Not exactly the same since (as far as I'm aware) ligatures are always based on a direct blending/combination of the two character's shapes, but still similar.
- simiones 5y agoI think programming ligatures kind of break this assumption - particularly != becoming the not equals sign.
- pgn674 5y agoIf you want to see how an emoji will render on various platforms, or generally search what's available, Emojipedia is good for that: https://emojipedia.org/kiss-woman-woman-medium-dark-skin-tone-light-skin-tone/ https://emojipedia.org/kiss-woman-woman-medium-dark-skin-ton...
- tialaramex 5y agoThis is definitely an example where "character" was the wrong word. We start out OK with bytes being distinct, but by the end we're talking about how a character is made out of several characters. If we think in terms of code points (Rust's native char type actually provides here a slightly different thing, a Unicode Scalar Value, which certain types of code point are not, but close enough) clearly a code point isn't made out of several code points, so we needed a different word. I like squiggle, if you're a text rendering engine you might want to use "glyph" although you might already need that word for something else. But try to avoid character because that word already has far too many meanings, most of which won't be what you wanted.
- ademarre 5y agoI think the term you are looking for is grapheme cluster. https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/14/stop-ascribing-meaning-to-unicode-code-points/ https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/14/stop-ascribing...
- kibwen 5y agoWe're so lazy that we can't even be bothered to type "character" half the time, so "grapheme cluster" has no chance to catch on unless we can think of a "char"-style abbreviation. I'll start the bikeshed with "gracl", but ambitious folks may wish to argue for "clog" ("cluster of graphemes").
- pbiggar 5y agoIt's really an Extended Grapheme Cluster. In our codebase (Darklang) we abbreviate it to EGC.
- irrational 5y agoHow about graph? One character longer than char and probably not already in use in the area of computer science.
- deleted 5y ago
- dukeofdoom 5y agoEmojis need more serious attention. A lot of online conflicts start from miscommunication due to lack of facial expressions. To the point thats its driving a social crisis and division in the real world.
- bluefirebrand 5y agoThis seems like much too large a problem to tackle with emoji. Even as complex as emoji are becoming, they really still don't address the issues behind online miscommunication. And I really doubt they ever could.
- quesera 5y agoAs a recent observer of a discussion wherein the dramatic differences between single, double, and triple-dot sentence terminators were argued, I think concerns about emoji facial expressions might be valid, but resolving them would still leave us in a world of crisis and division..
- dukeofdoom 5y agoHumans came up with a way to express musical notes on paper. To me that seems much more challenging. The list of common emotions is not that numerous. We need some shortcut, compact way of expressing them in writing. It would go a long way to score, or markup our words with some sort of emotion meter. Perhaps thats what music is to singing. Just maybe a visual way of doing that. Emojis are hard to use. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emotion/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-guide-to-human-emo...
- quesera 5y agoI'm not disagreeing, but note that humans have not come up with a way to express musical notes in Unicode or Emoji. The second vertical dimension is critical for music notation. I'd suggest that the same idea applies to nuanced facial expressions. You could certainly devise a set of glyphs to stand in, but they would have to be learned by everyone. The failures we see today are attempts at rendering expressions on drawn faces -- and to be fair, even a high res photographic still image of a real human making an expression could be easy to misinterpret. Especially across cultures and subcultures. My 15-year old niece has very strong opinions on how many periods I use to end sentences.. I think "fixing" emoji is probably a lost cause. But I am biased since I don't care at all. The most interesting and amusing thing I know about emoji is that when Apple changed the "gun" from a realistic-looking Glock/etc to a toy squirt gun, all the ingrates who used the image in a threatening manner ended up looking silly to iOS users. Android followed quickly. I support the same sillification of negative and angry facial expression emoji as well, FWIW, and I think it's probably hopeless to try to cram nuance into any of them. Fortunately, we still have words.
- mysterydip 5y agoI'm working on a game for younger kids using pictures/emojis for "universal" conversation rather than text, so this gave me some good ideas. Thanks!
- dllthomas 5y agoI've had success playing Concept with my 5yo. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147151/concept https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147151/concept
- scrollaway 5y agoSeconding the suggestion, concept is a great game for people of all ages learning a language. It's also a good game overall :)
- dllthomas 5y agoYes, I should note that I have also had substantial success playing Concept with friends, other family, and co-workers. Although we've never actually kept score, through any of that.
- exporectomy 5y agoIs there a good reason these composite emojis aren't all single code points? They have to at least mostly be separate images to be rendered, so it's not like it's an impossible combinatorial explosion. I remember there are only on the order of 1000 valid combinations.
- vitaflo 5y agoI would assume for backward compatibility. If you don’t have the font with the updated emojis you can still get the reference.
- avalys 5y agoIt is so stupid that Emojis render differently on different platforms. In particular there are subtle differences among the facial expression emojis that make them pretty useless if you’re not sure the recipient is on the same platform that you’re choosing one on.
- makeitdouble 5y agoIt's a reminder that these are glyphs, on the same plane as words, aimed at portability. I think what you are looking for is stamps and png/gifs, which are also supported in most relevant chat platforms these days.
- avalys 5y agoAn encoding for words that allowed rendering as different words on different platforms would also be stupid. MacOS: grimace Windows: frown Android: scowl Samsung: growl Firefox: angry face That’s pretty much what the emoji situation is today. I don’t understand what the actual use case is for the requirement that emojis differ across platforms. Yes, I realize they are widely used, but they are widely used despite this stupidity, not because of it.
- alisonatwork 5y agoDo you have any examples of current emojis that clearly have a very different meaning on different platforms? What you're saying might have been true 5+ years ago, but over time emojis have become more and more similar. Here is just one random article from Emojipedia about the history of the "folded hands" emoji: https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-folded-hands/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-folded-hands/ There are many more examples. In addition to that, almost all emoji keyboards now autocomplete the emoji based on standard names, so if you search for "disappointed" on most any emoji keyboard, you will get the same face. For reference, here is the current official emoji set, including the standard names and images showing how they render on different platforms: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
- tptacek 5y agoWhoah, it's a crafting game.
- holler 5y agoReally enjoyed, thank you for sharing. It was interesting to learn how emojis are composed from component parts. I'm wondering where that will lead to in the future? Will we have a vast built-in library of emojis of ever increasing complexity?
- Animats 5y agoThere was a flap when people realized that you can combine the zero-width joiner with the "Prohibited" symbol to put that on top of anything you don't like.
- JabavuAdams 5y agoI thought this was going to be about word embeddings!
- myroon5 5y agoreminds me of https://www.figma.com/blog/when-fonts-fall/ https://www.figma.com/blog/when-fonts-fall/
- agnosticmantis 5y agoFrom the title I thought this is similar to word arithmetic based on Word2Vec representations, where for example we approximately have: King - Man + Woman = Queen Or Brother - Man + Woman = Sister And some sexist variants of these too. But the article is on a different topic.
- egypturnash 5y agoBut as a software developer, it’s always fun to think about edge cases, and squeezing almost 5KB into a 280-“character” tweet is fun This makes me wonder if anyone has created a version of base64 that uses the vast, sprawling space of unicode to take advantage of these glyph-count-based restrictions. If they have, I hope they called it uuuniencode.
- alisonatwork 5y agoThere are several of these. base65536 is the one that seems to pop up the most often on HN, although base2048 is more useful for Twitter. On the GitHub page the dev helpfully links to the various implementations: https://github.com/qntm/base2048 https://github.com/qntm/base2048
- ludocode 5y agoThis is what you're looking for: https://github.com/qntm/base2048 https://github.com/qntm/base2048 It can store 385 bytes per tweet. This link includes a bit more technical explanation of how Twitter counts characters towards the limit. Apparently, using the entire range of unicode characters does not improve compression because of the double weighting of emojis and other characters as described in TFA. It links to a base131072 encoding which can only store 297 bytes per tweet.
- dcminter 5y agoThis reminds me of a fun iOS pizzle game from a few years back called "Alchemy" - you started with icons for earth, air, fire, and water and then combined them in a similar way to the title example to create others.
- scrollaway 5y agoYes it reminded me of that too. I thought it was a repost - pretty sure its original web version was posted on HN. I spent a lot of toilet visits on that game... became pretty unfun once the board is super full, though.
- Biondo458 5y agoThanks for sharing such great information, I highly appreciate your hard-working skills as the post you published have some great information which is quite beneficial for me, I hope you will post more like that in the future https://www.mybalancenow.win/ https://www.mybalancenow.win/
- transfire 5y agoEven our character encodings have turned into bloatware.
- bmn__ 5y agoConspiracy theory: 1. specification authors want to make sure the extended grapheme cluster algorithms are widely adopted so that implementations can correctly deal with devanagari 2. they notice no one gives a shit about brown people and their writing systems 3. combining emojis requiring the use of the same underlying algorithms were popularised in order to push the adoption
- emptyparadise 5y agoThat Twitter limit is interesting. I wonder how much data can fit in 140 emojis, if all existing and valid combinations are allowed?
- Thev00d00 5y agoThank $diety for emojis making sure most user facing code ends up handling extended code points correctly, and teaching devs about the multibyte encodings. I imagine in a world without them existing a lot of the non-ascii paths would not be regularly used.
- iforgotpassword 5y agoThe Emoji department of the unicode consortium is really just three letter agencies making sure text parsing and font rendering libs will continue to have exploitable bugs. ;-)
- yann-gael 5y agoI wonder where is the "substitution" of the codepoint sequence (from a sequence to a single codepoint) done? Very concretely and practically: is it the font doing the substitution? What else if not? How do they decide that a sequence should be substituted?