7 ms·
U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
- theamk 7mo agocontext: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
- Conscat 7mo agoThat's become of the most memorable threads on Hacker News to me. I definitely think about it at least once most weeks.
- qingcharles 7mo agoClosure finally!
- tantalor 7mo ago> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian Ah, of course :)
- bombcar 7mo agoHonestly the little example of how a sextant works was more interesting to me.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tantalor 7mo agoI prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
- MattConfluence 7mo ago> There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what U+237C is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Paraphrased from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
- cookiengineer 7mo agoI didn't know that this is a mystery? A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center. This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it. I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
- SAI_Peregrinus 7mo agoThe typographic symbol was the element in question, not what "Azimuth" is.
- Dawda 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- poizan42 7mo agoOkay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?
- cookiengineer 7mo agoBecause that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps? The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system. Maybe read the article next time? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_des_voyages https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
- aleyan 7mo agoThis is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it. Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude? [0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
- xvedejas 7mo agoShouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
- Polizeiposaune 7mo agoElevation -- the angle above the horizon -- is usually what's paired with azimuth.
- aleyan 7mo agoYes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself. Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible. Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon. [0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.71&lon=-74.00&date=2026-03-11T04%3A19Z https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.7...
- foxglacier 7mo agoI was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
- RobotToaster 7mo agoLet's hope fonts will start correcting it to the original form
- vishnuharidas 7mo ago“RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C
- Lasang 7mo agoOne of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software. Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields. It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
- adolph 7mo agoGiven it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
- SlinkyOnStairs 7mo ago> how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software. Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
- FeepingCreature 7mo agoIMO the biggest omission in Unicode are game controller button and keyboard emojis, as very frequently arise in game tutorials.
- Chaosvex 7mo agoMost games aren't shipping with full-fat unicode support or typefaces that could display those icons, though. Plus it'd start to break down with controllers that aren't simple A/B/X/Y.
- ssokolow 7mo agoBy "game tutorials", I think they mean modern successors to the role GameFAQs used to play. There is a combining character that, by its description, sounds like it should be implemented to do the desired thing (U+20DD Combining Enclosing Circle), but my fonts don't render it very well when I stuff geometric characters matching the PlayStation buttons into it. Without spaces: △⃝□⃝×⃝○⃝ With two spaces between each one so you can see how "enclosing" is getting interpreted: △⃝ □⃝ ×⃝ ○⃝ For the Markdown renderer I'm working on to replace WordPress for my blog, I resorted to shortcodes which resolve to CSS styling the `<kbd>` tag with `title` attributes to clarify and the occasional bit of inline SVG for things where I didn't want to specify a fixed font to get sufficient consistency, like PlayStation button glyphs. https://imgur.com/a/1EPm7QV https://imgur.com/a/1EPm7QV (In all fairness, it's a nerd-snipe made based on the idea that I'll be more willing to blog about things I have nice tools for. I don't currently typeset button presses in any form.)
- russellbeattie 7mo agoThe photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
- dhosek 7mo agoThose would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
- kindkang2024 7mo ago[flagged]
- marwanet 7mo ago[flagged]
- card_zero 7mo agoSomething got doubled six times in a row, big deal. In the case of the i-ching it's literally six bits of binary (expressed in yarrow stalks). In genetic codons there's four symbols instead of two, and three places instead of six, so the effect is the same. (Does base 4 have a name?)
- M2Ys4U 7mo ago>(Does base 4 have a name?) Quaternary
- kindkang2024 7mo ago[flagged]
- squeefers 7mo ago[dead]
- card_zero 7mo agoSmells like numerology.
- kindkang2024 7mo ago> Smells like numerology. Kind of. And as a guy with a solid science background, I just don't buy into that kind of interpretation. But if it is numerology, I believe I CHING divination is more like a commit-and-reveal scheme — you can't infer the future from the proof alone. You might only get to verify it once the future actually plays out. Kind of like a zero-knowledge proof — it gives you a proof/advice based on a possible future, but you gain nothing from it since the underlying computation is NP-hard. So better to treat it as a kind of thinking framework — like SWOT or scenario planning, but from a different cultural tradition.
- unit149 7mo ago[dead]
- cubefox 7mo agoNow can we find an example where this symbol was actually used in practice?
- bobosola 7mo agoGreat detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark. A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier. I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale. Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
- cookiengineer 7mo ago> Great detective work "Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_des_voyages https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de... I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.
- shezi 7mo agoThe image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question. I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept. This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- graemep 7mo agoThe existence of characters that need this much work to explain suggests to be that unicode is bloated. Not the only thing that suggests that, either.
- psychoslave 7mo agoThat’s unavoidable given the goal: Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. https://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html https://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
- graemep 7mo agoWhat does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
- wongarsu 7mo agoI take "every character" to mean "anything that was represented in a reasonably common pre-unicode code page or character encoding, as well as anything that might come up in OCR output of text documents". Emojis obviously got in from Japanese character encodings, and imho the world is off better for that. Though many of the extensions of the emoji set really don't seem to get what emojis are used for. Similarly, chess and shogi pieces as well as symbols from Western playing cards go in through previous encodings, and domino tiles got accepted based on being conceptually similar. A bit questionable imho. On the other hand the Azimuth sign seems to satifsy the "would appear in OCR scans", based on being published in font catalogues. Even if nobody has come forward with a book it appears in, I don't think they made and advertised lead type characters for fun. It has to have had some use in printed publications of some type (probably scientific, from the surrounding context)
- chmod775 7mo ago> What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? You may be too young to remember, but there was a time when a lot of software had their own way to encode emoji if they supported them. This sucked for interoperability - especially when using common protocols like SMS. Some of these implementations were essentially find/replace and would turn various strings of characters commonly occurring in code into emoji. Someone reading your mail containing code on their portable device or other weird client would see parts of that code replaced by emoji. Maybe you had to format your code a certain way, inserting spaces tactically, to avoid accidentally ending up with an emoji. I'm glad we put that behind us for the most part. Living in a world where you can just copy-paste some text containing emoji (or not) from one software into another is honestly great. Same for all these other symbols that may be embedded into text. If a software has to come up with their own text-embeddable encodings to represent symbols (to allow for copy-paste or sharing) things often end up less than optimal.
- krick 7mo agoI am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
- stkdump 7mo agoMaybe it was added as part of a larger set.
- kookybakker 7mo agoSeeing stuff like this, but knowing we can not get a unicode symbol for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourish_of_approval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourish_of_approval despite how ubiqitous it is in the Netherlands always frustrates me.
- vanderZwan 7mo agoPerhaps we would have more of a chance if we make a collection of international differences in checkmark designs and propose that set of glyphs as a whole.
- yorwba 7mo agoIt doesn't seem like anybody ever filed the paperwork for it. (A search for "krul" on site:unicode.org doesn't turn up anything.) Unicode symbols don't just magically appear! Somebody has to do a bit of work to make it happen. If you're frustrated by a missing symbol, that somebody is probably you!
- kookybakker 7mo agoI am quite sure it has been submitted and rejected before although indeed in my short search just now I couldn't find evidence for this statement. Edit: Seems like the earlier attempt stopped before ever getting to the proposal stage, maybe it is worth pushing through even though some of the requirements for the unicode standards can not be met.
- Lliora 7mo ago[flagged]
- tempodox 7mo agoThe Fonts in Use page from Berthold is fascinating. https://fontsinuse.com/foundry/159/berthold https://fontsinuse.com/foundry/159/berthold