10 ms·

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

by koboll 4y ago

colejohnson66 4y ago
Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Besides, there's room for 1,112,064 codepoints[a], and only 149,146 are in use. It's predicted we'll never use it up, so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need? [a]: U+10'FFFF max; it used to be U+FFFF'FFFF, but UTF-16 and surrogates ruined that
- modzu 4y ago
  why isnt the artist formerly known as prince in unicode?
- djur 4y ago
  Unicode doesn't have a character for every illuminated initial, nor should it. I'm not clear on why this character should be considered any differently.
  - j-bos 4y ago
    Because it's already been added to unicode. Now it's not a question of whether or not to add, rather to remove, and unicode almost by definition does not remove.
    - thayne 4y ago
      Unicode does have deprecated code points though. Not that I necessarily think making this character deprecated makes sense.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf It was introduced with other "ocular O"s which are seemingly more commonly used than this one. It's not quite an illuminated initial.
    - akavel 4y ago
      Wow, this is probably the most actually useful and interesting comment in this whole discussion, thanks! For anyone interested, the most relevant quotes from the document are in particular: "This document requests the addition of a number of Cyrillic characters to be added to the UCS. It also requests clarification in the Unicode Standard of four existing characters. This is a large proposal. While all of the characters are either Cyrillic characters (plus a couple which are used with the Cyrillic script), they are used by different communities. Some are used for non-Slavic minority languages and others are used for early Slavic philology and linguistics, while others are used in more recent ecclesiastical contexts. We considered the possibility of dividing the proposal into several proposals, but since this proposal involves changes to glyphs in the main Cyrillic block, adds a character to the main Cyrillic block, adds 16 characters to the Cyrillic Supplement block, adds 10 characters to the new Cyrillic Extended-A block currently under ballot, creates two entirely new Cyrillic blocks with 55 and 26 characters respectively, as well as adding two characters to the Supplementary Punctuation block, it seemed best for reviewers to keep everything together in one document. (...) MONOCULAR O Ꙩꙩ, BINOCULAR O Ꙫꙫ, DOUBLE MONOCULAR O Ꙭꙭ, and MULTIOCULAR O ꙮ are used in words which are based on the root for ‘eye’. The first is used when the wordform is singular, as ꙩкꙩ; the second and third are used in the root for ‘eye’ when the wordform is dual, as ꙫчи, ꙭчи; and the last in the epithet ‘many-eyed’ as in серафими многоꙮчитїй ‘many-eyed seraphim’. It has no upper-case form. See Figures 34, 41, 42, 55."
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        Literally everyone in choir: we have boooobs!
- bityard 4y ago
  Today, I wrote a document by hand containing a new symbol that only looks like genitalia if you squint really hard. Where do I apply to have it included in unicode so that it can be digitized properly?
  - koala_man 4y ago
    Can you reuse 𓂸 or 𓂺?
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      And for years we've just been using eggplants!
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      ( ﾉ ≧ ∇ ≦ ) ﾉﾐ ┻ ━ ┻ 〜 ( ꒪ ꒳ ꒪ ) 〜 ( ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ )
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Lol I never knew those existed. Apparently they're egyption hieroglyphs but it really makes me wonder the meanings of them now :) I also wonder how these didn't become insanely popular overnight, like the famous eggplant.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      Reuse rectangle or rectangle? (Seems to not render for me, win 10, chrome)
  - lucumo 4y ago
    Rule-lawyering wise-asses try to mess with many policies. It's rarely a sensible indictment of a policy, nor is it very effective. Anyone dealing with such people just ignores them.
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      What's the criterion that includes the document in the tweet, but excludes the document referenced by the GP?
- koboll 4y ago
  Okay, let's take a look at the context where the multiocular o was used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O I see that near it, there is an ef (Ф) with a very tall stem. Why should that not be included as a standard unicode character? Surely it is used more often than the multiocular o. You may say "it's a decorative flourish", which is of course true, but so is the multiocular o. Should we allow every conceivable decorative flourish into unicode? What is the standard for where flourishes become distinct characters?
- layer8 4y ago
  > Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Only for characters from existing coded character sets.
- bhk 4y ago
  Cataloging every doodle ever drawn inline with text by anyone at any time in history would exhaust any finite set of code points.
- kadoban 4y ago
  For as inclusive as that mission is, it seems weird to me how limited in certain areas unicode is. For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc. This doesn't contradict the stated goal exactly, but it seems against the spirit of it at least.
  - yakireev 4y ago
    One could argue that emoji should have never been added to Unicode in the first place. Peaches and butts are images, pictures, illustrations, whatever - but they are not characters. There's no writing system which has a colored drawing of a peach as a character.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      But that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.
      - yakireev 4y ago
        Most people (me included) like funny cat videos and send funny cat videos. Shall we include some to Unicode? I mean, this ship has long sailed, but that was a mistake nevertheless. Not everything has to be a unicode character.
        kadoban 4y ago
        If there were specific funny cat videos that were culturally relevent, maybe. For example I could see there being an emoji for keyboard cat.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        That wouldn't be practical. It would make fonts too big, and videos aren't a thing that goes inline in text. However, I could totally see some kind of open source GIF library of a few hundred meme videos and pictures, to standardize the "Reply with a GIF" thing in some P2P chat ecosystem, and maybe it could have a new URL scheme for referring to OpenMemes images.
- tzs 4y ago
  If that was once its mission, it was clearly abandoned long ago. They rejected Klingon characters on the grounds that it has low usage for communication, and that many of the people who do communicate in Klingon use a latinized form. ꙮ seems to just be a fancy way of writing О. I haven't seen anything that says it has a different meaning. The arguments for excluding Klingon seem to apply even more so to ꙮ.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    If you look through the old mailing list postings, the oft-left-implicit problem with Klingon (as well as Tengwar, Everson’s [EDIT: misspelling] pet project) is that it may get people into legal trouble (even though in a reasonable world it shouldn’t be able to). So in the unofficial CSUR / UCSUR they remain. A weird solitary character from the 1400s isn’t subject to that, and even if it’s a mistake it’s probably not worth breaking compatibility at this point (I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies). Similarly, for example, old ISO keyboard symbols (the ⌫ for erase backwards, but also a ton of virtually unused ones) were thrown in indiscriminately at the beginning of the project when attempting to cover every existing encoding, but when the ISO decided to extend the repertoire they were told to kindly provide examples of running-text (not iconic) usage in a non-member-body-controlled publication. (Crickets. The ISO keyboard input model itself only vaguely corresponds to how input methods for QWERTY-adjacent keyboards work in existing systems—as an attempt at rationalization, it seems to mostly be a failed one.)
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      [EDIT: Removed a section about the now-fixed typo] > I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies[.] Not exactly, the last break happened between Unicode 1.1 and 2.0 and the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A block still contains unified characters. The main reason for break was that both Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs required tons of additional code points and it became clear that 16-bit code space is dangerously insufficient; by 1.1 there was only a single big block of unassigned code points from U+A000 to U+E7FF (18,432 total), and there were 4,516 and 6,582 new Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs in 2.0 (11,098 total).
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  The thing is, this is just a decorative way to write “o”. It’s not a specific letter by any definition. I can’t speak of other letters that were added in the same batch in 2007. Some of them seam meaningful, I donno, I don’t speak old church slavonic (although I am told it sounds like Croatian, which I understand a little) http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf
- lmm 4y ago
  Meanwhile one still can't roundtrip regular Japanese without some kind of funky out-of-band signalling. By itself this kind of thing is harmless, but it speaks to poor prioritization from Unicode.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Why can’t it round-trip Japanese?
    - lmm 4y ago
      "Han Unification" - in Unicode many Japanese characters are represented as Chinese characters that look different (and subjectively ugly). The Unicode consortium's answer is that you're supposed to use a different font or something when displaying Japanese, which is pretty unsatisfying (e.g. if you want to have a block of text that contains both Japanese and Chinese, you can't represent that as just a Unicode string, it has to be some kind of rope of segments with their own fonts, at which point frankly you might as well just go back to bytes-with-encoding which at least breaks very clearly and visibly if you get it wrong).
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        You can use the deprecated language tag control codes to distinguish unified code points. It is unlikely to be well supported but it is there.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    This is incorrect. I think you defined round-trip as something else, but some character set A providing a round-trip compatibility with other set B means that B can be converted to A and back to B without a loss. And it is one of Unicode's explicit goals to provide a round-trip compatibility with major encodings including Japanese ones. Han unification only means that when you convert Japanese encodings (B) to Unicode (A), it is not distinguishable from non-Japanese encodings converted to Unicode. This means that the Unicode text doesn't always follow domestic conventions without out-of-band signaling or IVD or so. But if you know that the text was converted from a particular encoding, you can perfectly recover the original text encoded in that encoding.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  The artist Prince changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol for a few years. It appears in more than one document. Should it be added to Unicode?
  - caf 4y ago
    Probably. Maybe you can propose it.
- sloonz 4y ago
  > so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need? Fonts bloat (do you want a font with 1 million characters in it ? I don’t. Do you want to have to install 1000 fonts having 1000 characters each to be sure to cover all the Unicode table ? I don't). Lots of issues for everyday programmers (how do you handle weird unicode characters in your validation code ?) potentially leading to security issues (bypassing validation rules by close-but-different characters, phishing…)
- rhplus 4y ago
  By the original reasoning, shouldn’t every fancy illuminated character from medieval manuscripts get its own codepoint?
- IshKebab 4y ago
  That isn't Unicode's mission though. To get new characters added you have to show that people use it or would use it if it were available.
PeterisP 4y ago
At the moment this character is used in many documents and databases - including comments in this thread, the article mentioned there, etc. There could have been a good case not to include it back in 2007, but once it has been included, excluding it would break stuff.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  And updating it rather than adding a new, correct one, might make the current uses confusing ? Speaking of which, do we have any similar hexagonal symbol ?
reaperducer 4y ago
One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did One known and surviving use. It is possible that it exists in other places, since the vast majority of the planet's written work has not been digitized. It may also have been used other places that have not survived. Just because it's not important to you does not mean it is not important. The fact that is survived for 600 years makes it interesting and worth saving. It is infinitely unlikely that anything you do, write, or say will last that long.
- bhaney 4y ago
  > It is infinitely unlikely that anything you do, write, or say will last that long Ouch
- koboll 4y ago
  Sure it's possible, but there should be a higher bar than "it's possible it's used more than once" for meriting inclusion in the standard keyboard of billions of devices worldwide.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The thing is, looking at the page, there are many other characters that were not added - the large red С-looking characters, for example. But for some "bizarre" reason, those were not included in Unicode... Of course, the simple answer is that Unicode actually includes any character that someone cares enough to ask to be added, with rare exceptions.
runarberg 4y ago
idk. when the word Planet was redefined such that Pluto was no longer a planet, it kind of ruined the word Planet. It suddenly wasn’t nearly as useful as a word as it used to (even though now it has a precise meaning). For most people that use the word, it won’t matter (and is actually rather exciting) that they keep discovering new planets in our solar system. If they’d treat the word characters the same way, it would only serve to confuse and do no favors to the remaining glyphs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  This is temporary though, soon people will look at you funny if you say that Pluto is a planet - and/or they might not even have heardof it (though of course that is still worth learning about in an History of Science context). We do NOT keep discovering new planets, rather minor planets (I agree that the term is confusing), more than a million of them discovered in the Solar System now, like the 9007 James Bond.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    It could go either way, it is not always that the scientific meaning wins out, especially not when even scientists don’t find the new definition useful. When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology that isn’t a moon (I know excluding moons is arbitrary, and perhaps I shouldn’t do that; but hey, that’s language for you). I honestly don’t care about the orbit, and I bet that when most people think about planets they aren’t thinking about the orbit either, let alone whether the planet has cleared the orbit or not. I doubt that will change.
    - gerikson 4y ago
      > When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology Wouldn't that definition rule out gas giants?
Pinus 4y ago
Isn’t there an entire Unicode block for the symbols on the Phaistos disc? Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_(Unicode_block) . I suppose those occur in quite a few documents about the disc, even though the disc itself is the only known document written in those symbols.
bawolff 4y ago
There are characters in unicode with 0 usages that we dont even know where they came from. E.g. 彁
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  While the origin of 彁 will never be certain, there is a good chance that it came from a misinterpretation of 彊 [1]. Why is this not an accepted theory though? Because it is still possible that 彁 did appear in some reference source from the standardization, and neither that source or a source where 彊 does look like 彁 was found. [1] http://www.asahi.com/special/kotoba/archive2015/moji/2011082400019.html http://www.asahi.com/special/kotoba/archive2015/moji/2011082...

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

by koboll 4y ago

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

colejohnson66 4y ago

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Besides, there's room for 1,112,064 codepoints[a], and only 149,146 are in use. It's predicted we'll never use it up, so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need? [a]: U+10'FFFF max; it used to be U+FFFF'FFFF, but UTF-16 and surrogates ruined that

modzu 4y ago
why isnt the artist formerly known as prince in unicode?
djur 4y ago
Unicode doesn't have a character for every illuminated initial, nor should it. I'm not clear on why this character should be considered any differently.
- j-bos 4y ago
  Because it's already been added to unicode. Now it's not a question of whether or not to add, rather to remove, and unicode almost by definition does not remove.
  - thayne 4y ago
    Unicode does have deprecated code points though. Not that I necessarily think making this character deprecated makes sense.
- skyyler 4y ago
  http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf It was introduced with other "ocular O"s which are seemingly more commonly used than this one. It's not quite an illuminated initial.
  - akavel 4y ago
    Wow, this is probably the most actually useful and interesting comment in this whole discussion, thanks! For anyone interested, the most relevant quotes from the document are in particular: "This document requests the addition of a number of Cyrillic characters to be added to the UCS. It also requests clarification in the Unicode Standard of four existing characters. This is a large proposal. While all of the characters are either Cyrillic characters (plus a couple which are used with the Cyrillic script), they are used by different communities. Some are used for non-Slavic minority languages and others are used for early Slavic philology and linguistics, while others are used in more recent ecclesiastical contexts. We considered the possibility of dividing the proposal into several proposals, but since this proposal involves changes to glyphs in the main Cyrillic block, adds a character to the main Cyrillic block, adds 16 characters to the Cyrillic Supplement block, adds 10 characters to the new Cyrillic Extended-A block currently under ballot, creates two entirely new Cyrillic blocks with 55 and 26 characters respectively, as well as adding two characters to the Supplementary Punctuation block, it seemed best for reviewers to keep everything together in one document. (...) MONOCULAR O Ꙩꙩ, BINOCULAR O Ꙫꙫ, DOUBLE MONOCULAR O Ꙭꙭ, and MULTIOCULAR O ꙮ are used in words which are based on the root for ‘eye’. The first is used when the wordform is singular, as ꙩкꙩ; the second and third are used in the root for ‘eye’ when the wordform is dual, as ꙫчи, ꙭчи; and the last in the epithet ‘many-eyed’ as in серафими многоꙮчитїй ‘many-eyed seraphim’. It has no upper-case form. See Figures 34, 41, 42, 55."
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      Literally everyone in choir: we have boooobs!
bityard 4y ago
Today, I wrote a document by hand containing a new symbol that only looks like genitalia if you squint really hard. Where do I apply to have it included in unicode so that it can be digitized properly?
- koala_man 4y ago
  Can you reuse 𓂸 or 𓂺?
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    And for years we've just been using eggplants!
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    ( ﾉ ≧ ∇ ≦ ) ﾉﾐ ┻ ━ ┻ 〜 ( ꒪ ꒳ ꒪ ) 〜 ( ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ )
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Lol I never knew those existed. Apparently they're egyption hieroglyphs but it really makes me wonder the meanings of them now :) I also wonder how these didn't become insanely popular overnight, like the famous eggplant.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Reuse rectangle or rectangle? (Seems to not render for me, win 10, chrome)
- lucumo 4y ago
  Rule-lawyering wise-asses try to mess with many policies. It's rarely a sensible indictment of a policy, nor is it very effective. Anyone dealing with such people just ignores them.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    What's the criterion that includes the document in the tweet, but excludes the document referenced by the GP?
koboll 4y ago
Okay, let's take a look at the context where the multiocular o was used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O I see that near it, there is an ef (Ф) with a very tall stem. Why should that not be included as a standard unicode character? Surely it is used more often than the multiocular o. You may say "it's a decorative flourish", which is of course true, but so is the multiocular o. Should we allow every conceivable decorative flourish into unicode? What is the standard for where flourishes become distinct characters?
layer8 4y ago
> Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Only for characters from existing coded character sets.
bhk 4y ago
Cataloging every doodle ever drawn inline with text by anyone at any time in history would exhaust any finite set of code points.
kadoban 4y ago
For as inclusive as that mission is, it seems weird to me how limited in certain areas unicode is. For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc. This doesn't contradict the stated goal exactly, but it seems against the spirit of it at least.
- yakireev 4y ago
  One could argue that emoji should have never been added to Unicode in the first place. Peaches and butts are images, pictures, illustrations, whatever - but they are not characters. There's no writing system which has a colored drawing of a peach as a character.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    But that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.
    - yakireev 4y ago
      Most people (me included) like funny cat videos and send funny cat videos. Shall we include some to Unicode? I mean, this ship has long sailed, but that was a mistake nevertheless. Not everything has to be a unicode character.
      - kadoban 4y ago
        If there were specific funny cat videos that were culturally relevent, maybe. For example I could see there being an emoji for keyboard cat.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        That wouldn't be practical. It would make fonts too big, and videos aren't a thing that goes inline in text. However, I could totally see some kind of open source GIF library of a few hundred meme videos and pictures, to standardize the "Reply with a GIF" thing in some P2P chat ecosystem, and maybe it could have a new URL scheme for referring to OpenMemes images.
tzs 4y ago
If that was once its mission, it was clearly abandoned long ago. They rejected Klingon characters on the grounds that it has low usage for communication, and that many of the people who do communicate in Klingon use a latinized form. ꙮ seems to just be a fancy way of writing О. I haven't seen anything that says it has a different meaning. The arguments for excluding Klingon seem to apply even more so to ꙮ.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  If you look through the old mailing list postings, the oft-left-implicit problem with Klingon (as well as Tengwar, Everson’s [EDIT: misspelling] pet project) is that it may get people into legal trouble (even though in a reasonable world it shouldn’t be able to). So in the unofficial CSUR / UCSUR they remain. A weird solitary character from the 1400s isn’t subject to that, and even if it’s a mistake it’s probably not worth breaking compatibility at this point (I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies). Similarly, for example, old ISO keyboard symbols (the ⌫ for erase backwards, but also a ton of virtually unused ones) were thrown in indiscriminately at the beginning of the project when attempting to cover every existing encoding, but when the ISO decided to extend the repertoire they were told to kindly provide examples of running-text (not iconic) usage in a non-member-body-controlled publication. (Crickets. The ISO keyboard input model itself only vaguely corresponds to how input methods for QWERTY-adjacent keyboards work in existing systems—as an attempt at rationalization, it seems to mostly be a failed one.)
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    [EDIT: Removed a section about the now-fixed typo] > I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies[.] Not exactly, the last break happened between Unicode 1.1 and 2.0 and the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A block still contains unified characters. The main reason for break was that both Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs required tons of additional code points and it became clear that 16-bit code space is dangerously insufficient; by 1.1 there was only a single big block of unassigned code points from U+A000 to U+E7FF (18,432 total), and there were 4,516 and 6,582 new Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs in 2.0 (11,098 total).
shp0ngle 4y ago
The thing is, this is just a decorative way to write “o”. It’s not a specific letter by any definition. I can’t speak of other letters that were added in the same batch in 2007. Some of them seam meaningful, I donno, I don’t speak old church slavonic (although I am told it sounds like Croatian, which I understand a little) http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf
lmm 4y ago
Meanwhile one still can't roundtrip regular Japanese without some kind of funky out-of-band signalling. By itself this kind of thing is harmless, but it speaks to poor prioritization from Unicode.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Why can’t it round-trip Japanese?
  - lmm 4y ago
    "Han Unification" - in Unicode many Japanese characters are represented as Chinese characters that look different (and subjectively ugly). The Unicode consortium's answer is that you're supposed to use a different font or something when displaying Japanese, which is pretty unsatisfying (e.g. if you want to have a block of text that contains both Japanese and Chinese, you can't represent that as just a Unicode string, it has to be some kind of rope of segments with their own fonts, at which point frankly you might as well just go back to bytes-with-encoding which at least breaks very clearly and visibly if you get it wrong).
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      You can use the deprecated language tag control codes to distinguish unified code points. It is unlikely to be well supported but it is there.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  This is incorrect. I think you defined round-trip as something else, but some character set A providing a round-trip compatibility with other set B means that B can be converted to A and back to B without a loss. And it is one of Unicode's explicit goals to provide a round-trip compatibility with major encodings including Japanese ones. Han unification only means that when you convert Japanese encodings (B) to Unicode (A), it is not distinguishable from non-Japanese encodings converted to Unicode. This means that the Unicode text doesn't always follow domestic conventions without out-of-band signaling or IVD or so. But if you know that the text was converted from a particular encoding, you can perfectly recover the original text encoded in that encoding.
School-Cotton 4y ago
The artist Prince changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol for a few years. It appears in more than one document. Should it be added to Unicode?
- caf 4y ago
  Probably. Maybe you can propose it.
sloonz 4y ago
> so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need? Fonts bloat (do you want a font with 1 million characters in it ? I don’t. Do you want to have to install 1000 fonts having 1000 characters each to be sure to cover all the Unicode table ? I don't). Lots of issues for everyday programmers (how do you handle weird unicode characters in your validation code ?) potentially leading to security issues (bypassing validation rules by close-but-different characters, phishing…)
rhplus 4y ago
By the original reasoning, shouldn’t every fancy illuminated character from medieval manuscripts get its own codepoint?
IshKebab 4y ago
That isn't Unicode's mission though. To get new characters added you have to show that people use it or would use it if it were available.

PeterisP 4y ago

At the moment this character is used in many documents and databases - including comments in this thread, the article mentioned there, etc. There could have been a good case not to include it back in 2007, but once it has been included, excluding it would break stuff.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
And updating it rather than adding a new, correct one, might make the current uses confusing ? Speaking of which, do we have any similar hexagonal symbol ?

reaperducer 4y ago

One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did One known and surviving use. It is possible that it exists in other places, since the vast majority of the planet's written work has not been digitized. It may also have been used other places that have not survived. Just because it's not important to you does not mean it is not important. The fact that is survived for 600 years makes it interesting and worth saving. It is infinitely unlikely that anything you do, write, or say will last that long.

bhaney 4y ago
> It is infinitely unlikely that anything you do, write, or say will last that long Ouch
koboll 4y ago
Sure it's possible, but there should be a higher bar than "it's possible it's used more than once" for meriting inclusion in the standard keyboard of billions of devices worldwide.
tsimionescu 4y ago
The thing is, looking at the page, there are many other characters that were not added - the large red С-looking characters, for example. But for some "bizarre" reason, those were not included in Unicode... Of course, the simple answer is that Unicode actually includes any character that someone cares enough to ask to be added, with rare exceptions.

runarberg 4y ago

idk. when the word Planet was redefined such that Pluto was no longer a planet, it kind of ruined the word Planet. It suddenly wasn’t nearly as useful as a word as it used to (even though now it has a precise meaning). For most people that use the word, it won’t matter (and is actually rather exciting) that they keep discovering new planets in our solar system. If they’d treat the word characters the same way, it would only serve to confuse and do no favors to the remaining glyphs.

deleted 4y ago
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BlueTemplar 4y ago
This is temporary though, soon people will look at you funny if you say that Pluto is a planet - and/or they might not even have heardof it (though of course that is still worth learning about in an History of Science context). We do NOT keep discovering new planets, rather minor planets (I agree that the term is confusing), more than a million of them discovered in the Solar System now, like the 9007 James Bond.
- runarberg 4y ago
  It could go either way, it is not always that the scientific meaning wins out, especially not when even scientists don’t find the new definition useful. When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology that isn’t a moon (I know excluding moons is arbitrary, and perhaps I shouldn’t do that; but hey, that’s language for you). I honestly don’t care about the orbit, and I bet that when most people think about planets they aren’t thinking about the orbit either, let alone whether the planet has cleared the orbit or not. I doubt that will change.
  - gerikson 4y ago
    > When I think of a planet, I think of a world that has active geology Wouldn't that definition rule out gas giants?

Pinus 4y ago

Isn’t there an entire Unicode block for the symbols on the Phaistos disc? Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_(Unicode_block) . I suppose those occur in quite a few documents about the disc, even though the disc itself is the only known document written in those symbols.

bawolff 4y ago

There are characters in unicode with 0 usages that we dont even know where they came from. E.g. 彁

lifthrasiir 4y ago
While the origin of 彁 will never be certain, there is a good chance that it came from a misinterpretation of 彊 [1]. Why is this not an accepted theory though? Because it is still possible that 彁 did appear in some reference source from the standardization, and neither that source or a source where 彊 does look like 彁 was found. [1] http://www.asahi.com/special/kotoba/archive2015/moji/2011082400019.html http://www.asahi.com/special/kotoba/archive2015/moji/2011082...