3 ms·
The drum for the Shuttle teleprinter replaces 10 ASCII special characters with symbols that are more useful to the Shuttle, such as Greek letters for angles. S
by rkagerer 2y ago
The drum for the Shuttle teleprinter replaces 10 ASCII special characters with symbols that are more useful to the Shuttle, such as Greek letters for angles.
Specifically, the characters ;@[\]^!"#$ are replaced by θ~αβΔ.
Sigh... This ancient printer could render them, but apparently the Chrome browser on my modern Android cannot.
- tialaramex 2y agoSomewhere between when this was originally written and when it was delivered to your browser the text here was destroyed. I don't see how that's the fault of Chrome or Android.
- Narishma 2y agoIt works fine in Firefox.
- tialaramex 2y agoYup. I was mistaken about the problem.
- Stratoscope 2y agoOddly enough, Chrome on my Samsung S24 Ultra renders them OK here on HN, but not on Ken's page. Chrome on Windows and Ubuntu and Safari on iOS are the opposite: OK on the page, not here. Character encoding is such fun! Update: Ken, if you see this, it's specifically the characters encoded with numeric entities that have the problem on my devices. I used the Chrome dev tools to replace these with the actual characters on my Windows and Ubuntu devices and they rendered OK.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- skylanh 2y agoAuthor font family: normal normal 14px Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; News YC font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; Per https://unicode.scarfboy.com/ https://unicode.scarfboy.com/ these are the characters (formatting issues are expected): U+03B8 θ GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA U+2713 CHECK MARK U+203E ‾ OVERLINE U+2191 ↑ UPWARDS ARROW U+2193 ↓ DOWNWARDS ARROW U+007E ~ TILDE U+03B1 α GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA U+03B2 β GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA U+0394 Δ GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA U+03D5 ϕ GREEK PHI SYMBOL Specific characters that aren't showing up: U+2713 CHECK MARK, U+203E ‾ OVERLINE, U+2191 ↑ UPWARDS ARROW, U+2193 ↓ DOWNWARDS ARROW, U+03D5 ϕ GREEK PHI SYMBOL Arial contains most of these, Verdana does not. That's the limit of my knowledge of webified things.
- kens 2y agoI think you posted this just as I was removing the <code> tag, so you're looking at the (hopefully) working fonts, not the bad fixed-width font.
- 2Gkashmiri 2y agoIs it not possible for a website to tell the os, here use the maximum compatible font you have. Instead of trying to use Google fonts ?
- yencabulator 2y agoGenerally that's done by adding a fallback font that's complete; nothing to do with your OS as such. https://fonts.google.com/noto https://fonts.google.com/noto
- kens 2y agoIt looks like the <code> tag is the problem. I guess the Android Chrome code font doesn't include those special characters. I took out the <code> tag and now the characters render on Android (at least for me).
- rkagerer 2y agoThat fixed it, thanks Ken.