7 ms·

Do we really need small pictures in fonts?

by buster 12y ago

rational-future 12y ago
That is what fonts are - sets of small pictures, accessible by an index.
- buster 12y ago
  I really don't agree on your definition of fonts. When i write a letter i am certainly not painting rows of little pictures on a sheet of paper.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    You are if you write hieroglyphics. From another point of view you are when you write English too.
    - buster 12y ago
      So, putting poo into unicode is just the same as hieroglyphs? Or hebrew or arabic or chinese characters? Still don't agree.
      - sho_hn 12y ago
        How are emoji different from other logograms?
        meepmorp 12y ago
        I don't think emoji are logograms. Logograms represent actual words in a language, as opposed to emoji which don't have a conventional mapping to words (unless you consider the unicode character names such mappings, which is odd since most users don't have any idea what the character names are).
        sho_hn 12y ago
        You're right, but at the same time the level of abstraction it offers over spoken language is one of the reasons for the historic success of logographic writing. For example, in Chinese history it allowed mutually unintelligible dialects to more easily exchange information in writing, and it isolated orthography from shifts in pronunciation to a greater degree than possible with phonographic scripts. I feel like emoji have some similar properties along these lines, but of course also their own set of problems (specific visualizations can become dated, for example). A fair bunch of Chinese characters are also actually pictographic (they're an image of something) or ideographic (they represent an abstract idea, not a morpheme or word) in origin, if not current usage. This stuff - synergies and conflicts between writing systems and various media - fascinates me. Chinese writing for example now suffers from the problem that if your medium doesn't allow free-form painting/graphical compositing (like our computers largely don't right now) you can't easily coin new logograms, since you need a central registry that's slow to distribute to leaf nodes (cf. Unicode). So what's happening now is that new words get coined by recombining existing characters based on their sound value, adding a phonographic layer on top. And of course inputting Chinese has also become dependent on auxiliary systems like pinyin-based IMEs. Meanwhile, the Korean Hangul alphabet has the interesting property that some of the letters graphically derive from each other with consistent patterns of "take this, add a stroke and you get this", making it easier to design keyboards with reduced numbers of buttons to enter combos. There's the theory that this contributed to the success of texting/mobile in Korea, and is a contributing reason for the healthy mobile industry there. I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
        meepmorp 12y ago
        > I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation. Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji. If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.
        buster 12y ago
        I don't even understand your question. How is a character of a normal language (and i consider chinese normal) different from the picture of crap? And why would we put up a huge library of tiny pictures? If i want to look at cat pics, i don't open up the font browser. And where is the HN-logo unicode point? Can i register my own somewhere? Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or poo or snowmen. Just my opinion, though. Obviously a great many people like shit in their fonts.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        So what about all the characters in Unicode that map to different phonemes or words in different languages? For example, Latin letters are sometimes used for different phonemes in different languages (and dialects, and applications like romanization), and Han logograms are sometimes used for different words/morphemes in different languages. How is that different from "picture of crap" mapping to different specific words/phrases in different languages? You can certainly point at a picture of a pile of crap and name it in many normal languages. But wait - what's a "normal language" and what's a normal graphical representation of it? Is it down to the development process? A lot of writing systems were originally designed/agreed upon by small groups of people, too, for example. My questions (and other comments in this subthread) aim to get you to think more abstractly about the problem space and define your beef more accurately, because I'm interested in this question (where should Unicode draw the line) as well. Let's brainstorm, basically.
        buster 12y ago
        The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes. Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one. Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier. * = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
        rejschaap 12y ago
        There is a good case for adding ancient languages to Unicode. I can also see the case for adding smiley faces, which could be seen as a contemporary global language. But I fail to see the case for pictures of poop, pizza and cowbell. That just seems a bit random to me. Maybe everyone is drawing the line somewhere else, but I'm guessing most people don't want to go down the road of adding company logo's for Coca-Cola and McDonalds or pictures of the Americans presidents or the sigils from Game of Thrones. It's good that Unicode is extendable and all, but that doesn't mean we should be adding glyphs just for the sake of it. Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy). All that said, I love Unicode, it has flaws but I think it's brilliant (no sarcasm). Also, can't wait to actually use the man-in-business-suit-levitating-glyph (sarcasm). I'd use the Unicode sarcasm marks, but your font probably doesn't support them yet...
        scrollaway 12y ago
        > Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy). As someone else pointed out, it comes from Wingdings, for which there has been an effort to fully get into Unicode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webdings-big.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webd...
stephen_g 12y ago
Why not? It's not like every font of every typeface has to implement every Unicode code point. You'd probably only have one or two installed that have the emoji characters.
- buster 12y ago
  Because it's waste. Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know? How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all. It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Glyphs that are not supported should fallback to a font that does support them.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > Because it's waste. Waste of what? > Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Most fonts only implements a fraction of unicode, is unicode a waste? Is cyrillic in unicode a waste? Is Cherokee? Braille symbols? Buginese and Meroitic cursive? > Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know? Yes? The software will fall back on a font which does provide the glyphs, or display a block with the codepoint if it doesn't have any. > How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all. How would you use letters on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the letters, because it may be implemented differently or not at all? Not only that, but unicode is not specific to websites for fuck's sake, not only will somebody find a use for them on websites even if you can't, somebody will definitely find a use for them outside of websites. Most (or all?) of the new emoji are inherited from windings[0] and webdings[1], they don't come out of nowhere. > It just looks like a big waste for no good reason. Again, a big waste of what? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings
gtirloni 12y ago
I had the exact same question pop up in my mind after seeing the emoji's. I understand all characters can be considered nothing but pictures, but a thermometer, really? Is this used in any widespread language to be of significance to Unicode? Is Unicode trying to also offer some kind of clipart capability? I think we've seen our fair share of derailed projects in IT. Unicode is certainly a very critical project, which makes its focus even more important.
- sho_hn 12y ago
  Unicode contains a wide range of different scripts. For example, some are phonographic (the letters represent phonemes, i.e. speech sounds), others are logographic (the letters represent words, or morphemes). Both of these can be featural: The Korean Hangul script is phonographic, but the letter shapes are not arbitrary. Some of them are visualizations of mouth shape or tongue position when producing the sound. For example the velar consonant ㄱ (somewhere inbetween the English g and k, roughly) is the tongue position as seen from the side. A logogram can also be featural, i.e. it can look like the thing it represents. This would be the case for a glyph that means "thermometer" and looks to viewers like a thermometer. It could also be arbitrary - some shape that you just agree on to mean thermometer. Perhaps sharing some graphical aspects with topically related logograms. They're all just spots on a spectrum. (Edit: I briefly touched on pictograms vs. ideograms a bit more down below.)
- elfcard 12y ago
  That's amusing, because I looked at the thermometer, and thought, oh that's good, I can use that. But a chilli pepper, do we really need a character for a chilli pepper? So to answer your question, unicode is trying to bridge the gap in communication that offers a language independent set of recognizable glyphs that can be used to communicate. And one mans chilli pepper is another mans thermometer.
  - yoz-y 12y ago
    I suppose that the chilli pepper is there for restaurant menus which often use it as an indicator of spiciness.
JetSpiegel 12y ago
Hopefully it will stop the nonsense of having custom fonts in websites for icons. Which can be copied and turn out to be a "t" or something.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  It won't. Those custom fonts you speak about not only use characters which aren't, and never would be in the unicode database (such as trademarked logos), but also draw from the private unicode blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas Which means there's no sanely written font that would use a "t" for an icon. Wingdings is not a sanely written font.
smackfu 12y ago
That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.
- buster 12y ago
  And you consider Wingdings a good thing in the first place?! It's an abomination that should never have happened.
  - gioele 12y ago
    But it did happen. And it has been used a lot. So, for the sake of interoperability and the ability to read back these documents in a future Unicode-only world, we have to encode them.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Never said that, but the current situation is that we have glyphs that people are using in documents that can't be represented in Unicode, and that's pretty much the main reason there are Unicode revisions in the first place.
    - buster 12y ago
      Why would documents using Webdings stop working today? I'm pretty sure they still work. That's a lame excuse. Considering your point, wouldn't it have been the chance to clean up this mess with unicode instead of piling up shitty icons in a standard?
TorKlingberg 12y ago
They are in Unicode for compatibility with other encodings, to make it easier to switch to Unicode. Most of the emoji comes from Japanese mobile phone carriers or fonts like Wingdings.
greggman 12y ago
Yes, to support 15 years of Japanese communication since they were introduced to cellphones in Japan in 1998 and the majority of users here use them.
sisk 12y ago
You might not need them but consider this for a moment: When I was a kid, there was a boy in my class who was mute. He carried a chalkboard and flashcards to facilitate communication. Eventually, he was chosen to pilot a device that was sort of like a keyboard with oversized keys. Each key had a pictograph on it[0]. Wouldn't it be nice for him if the flashcards and keyboard device had a consistent set of characters that were easily recognizable not only by him but by the people with whom he was communicating? Now, would he ever need "MAN IN SUIT LEVITATING"? Probably not (you never know!) but I'm glad there is a standard set of otherwise useful pictographs for people like him. [0] - I'm in my late 20s but this was when few families owned computers, let alone super-helpful handheld devices. Also worth mentioning that this boy knew ASL but attended a regular public school where few students and faculty could so the chalkboard and flashcards were infinitely more practical.
- buster 12y ago
  And that device would have a keyboard with thousands of keys? Btw. that device exists today, and it's called a tablet. I'm pretty sure i have seen stuff exactly like that and it serves a great purpose. The consistent set of "characters" (pictures in this case) would still look very different on each device or application that uses another font. Because a banana in one font could look very different in another font. The only thing that actually would be consistent if the content he uses would use actual pictures! (A website displaying a banana on his touchpad can look different on his laptop, can't it?).

Do we really need small pictures in fonts?

by buster 12y ago

Do we really need small pictures in fonts?

rational-future 12y ago

That is what fonts are - sets of small pictures, accessible by an index.

buster 12y ago
I really don't agree on your definition of fonts. When i write a letter i am certainly not painting rows of little pictures on a sheet of paper.
- justincormack 12y ago
  You are if you write hieroglyphics. From another point of view you are when you write English too.
  - buster 12y ago
    So, putting poo into unicode is just the same as hieroglyphs? Or hebrew or arabic or chinese characters? Still don't agree.
    - sho_hn 12y ago
      How are emoji different from other logograms?
      - meepmorp 12y ago
        I don't think emoji are logograms. Logograms represent actual words in a language, as opposed to emoji which don't have a conventional mapping to words (unless you consider the unicode character names such mappings, which is odd since most users don't have any idea what the character names are).
        sho_hn 12y ago
        You're right, but at the same time the level of abstraction it offers over spoken language is one of the reasons for the historic success of logographic writing. For example, in Chinese history it allowed mutually unintelligible dialects to more easily exchange information in writing, and it isolated orthography from shifts in pronunciation to a greater degree than possible with phonographic scripts. I feel like emoji have some similar properties along these lines, but of course also their own set of problems (specific visualizations can become dated, for example). A fair bunch of Chinese characters are also actually pictographic (they're an image of something) or ideographic (they represent an abstract idea, not a morpheme or word) in origin, if not current usage. This stuff - synergies and conflicts between writing systems and various media - fascinates me. Chinese writing for example now suffers from the problem that if your medium doesn't allow free-form painting/graphical compositing (like our computers largely don't right now) you can't easily coin new logograms, since you need a central registry that's slow to distribute to leaf nodes (cf. Unicode). So what's happening now is that new words get coined by recombining existing characters based on their sound value, adding a phonographic layer on top. And of course inputting Chinese has also become dependent on auxiliary systems like pinyin-based IMEs. Meanwhile, the Korean Hangul alphabet has the interesting property that some of the letters graphically derive from each other with consistent patterns of "take this, add a stroke and you get this", making it easier to design keyboards with reduced numbers of buttons to enter combos. There's the theory that this contributed to the success of texting/mobile in Korea, and is a contributing reason for the healthy mobile industry there. I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
        meepmorp 12y ago
        > I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation. Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji. If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.
      - buster 12y ago
        I don't even understand your question. How is a character of a normal language (and i consider chinese normal) different from the picture of crap? And why would we put up a huge library of tiny pictures? If i want to look at cat pics, i don't open up the font browser. And where is the HN-logo unicode point? Can i register my own somewhere? Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or poo or snowmen. Just my opinion, though. Obviously a great many people like shit in their fonts.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        So what about all the characters in Unicode that map to different phonemes or words in different languages? For example, Latin letters are sometimes used for different phonemes in different languages (and dialects, and applications like romanization), and Han logograms are sometimes used for different words/morphemes in different languages. How is that different from "picture of crap" mapping to different specific words/phrases in different languages? You can certainly point at a picture of a pile of crap and name it in many normal languages. But wait - what's a "normal language" and what's a normal graphical representation of it? Is it down to the development process? A lot of writing systems were originally designed/agreed upon by small groups of people, too, for example. My questions (and other comments in this subthread) aim to get you to think more abstractly about the problem space and define your beef more accurately, because I'm interested in this question (where should Unicode draw the line) as well. Let's brainstorm, basically.
        buster 12y ago
        The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes. Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one. Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier. * = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
      - rejschaap 12y ago
        There is a good case for adding ancient languages to Unicode. I can also see the case for adding smiley faces, which could be seen as a contemporary global language. But I fail to see the case for pictures of poop, pizza and cowbell. That just seems a bit random to me. Maybe everyone is drawing the line somewhere else, but I'm guessing most people don't want to go down the road of adding company logo's for Coca-Cola and McDonalds or pictures of the Americans presidents or the sigils from Game of Thrones. It's good that Unicode is extendable and all, but that doesn't mean we should be adding glyphs just for the sake of it. Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy). All that said, I love Unicode, it has flaws but I think it's brilliant (no sarcasm). Also, can't wait to actually use the man-in-business-suit-levitating-glyph (sarcasm). I'd use the Unicode sarcasm marks, but your font probably doesn't support them yet...
        scrollaway 12y ago
        > Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy). As someone else pointed out, it comes from Wingdings, for which there has been an effort to fully get into Unicode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webdings-big.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webd...

stephen_g 12y ago

Why not? It's not like every font of every typeface has to implement every Unicode code point. You'd probably only have one or two installed that have the emoji characters.

buster 12y ago
Because it's waste. Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know? How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all. It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Glyphs that are not supported should fallback to a font that does support them.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > Because it's waste. Waste of what? > Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Most fonts only implements a fraction of unicode, is unicode a waste? Is cyrillic in unicode a waste? Is Cherokee? Braille symbols? Buginese and Meroitic cursive? > Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know? Yes? The software will fall back on a font which does provide the glyphs, or display a block with the codepoint if it doesn't have any. > How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all. How would you use letters on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the letters, because it may be implemented differently or not at all? Not only that, but unicode is not specific to websites for fuck's sake, not only will somebody find a use for them on websites even if you can't, somebody will definitely find a use for them outside of websites. Most (or all?) of the new emoji are inherited from windings[0] and webdings[1], they don't come out of nowhere. > It just looks like a big waste for no good reason. Again, a big waste of what? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings

gtirloni 12y ago

I had the exact same question pop up in my mind after seeing the emoji's. I understand all characters can be considered nothing but pictures, but a thermometer, really? Is this used in any widespread language to be of significance to Unicode? Is Unicode trying to also offer some kind of clipart capability? I think we've seen our fair share of derailed projects in IT. Unicode is certainly a very critical project, which makes its focus even more important.

sho_hn 12y ago
Unicode contains a wide range of different scripts. For example, some are phonographic (the letters represent phonemes, i.e. speech sounds), others are logographic (the letters represent words, or morphemes). Both of these can be featural: The Korean Hangul script is phonographic, but the letter shapes are not arbitrary. Some of them are visualizations of mouth shape or tongue position when producing the sound. For example the velar consonant ㄱ (somewhere inbetween the English g and k, roughly) is the tongue position as seen from the side. A logogram can also be featural, i.e. it can look like the thing it represents. This would be the case for a glyph that means "thermometer" and looks to viewers like a thermometer. It could also be arbitrary - some shape that you just agree on to mean thermometer. Perhaps sharing some graphical aspects with topically related logograms. They're all just spots on a spectrum. (Edit: I briefly touched on pictograms vs. ideograms a bit more down below.)
elfcard 12y ago
That's amusing, because I looked at the thermometer, and thought, oh that's good, I can use that. But a chilli pepper, do we really need a character for a chilli pepper? So to answer your question, unicode is trying to bridge the gap in communication that offers a language independent set of recognizable glyphs that can be used to communicate. And one mans chilli pepper is another mans thermometer.
- yoz-y 12y ago
  I suppose that the chilli pepper is there for restaurant menus which often use it as an indicator of spiciness.

JetSpiegel 12y ago

Hopefully it will stop the nonsense of having custom fonts in websites for icons. Which can be copied and turn out to be a "t" or something.

scrollaway 12y ago
It won't. Those custom fonts you speak about not only use characters which aren't, and never would be in the unicode database (such as trademarked logos), but also draw from the private unicode blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas Which means there's no sanely written font that would use a "t" for an icon. Wingdings is not a sanely written font.

smackfu 12y ago

That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.

buster 12y ago
And you consider Wingdings a good thing in the first place?! It's an abomination that should never have happened.
- gioele 12y ago
  But it did happen. And it has been used a lot. So, for the sake of interoperability and the ability to read back these documents in a future Unicode-only world, we have to encode them.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Never said that, but the current situation is that we have glyphs that people are using in documents that can't be represented in Unicode, and that's pretty much the main reason there are Unicode revisions in the first place.
  - buster 12y ago
    Why would documents using Webdings stop working today? I'm pretty sure they still work. That's a lame excuse. Considering your point, wouldn't it have been the chance to clean up this mess with unicode instead of piling up shitty icons in a standard?

TorKlingberg 12y ago

They are in Unicode for compatibility with other encodings, to make it easier to switch to Unicode. Most of the emoji comes from Japanese mobile phone carriers or fonts like Wingdings.

greggman 12y ago

Yes, to support 15 years of Japanese communication since they were introduced to cellphones in Japan in 1998 and the majority of users here use them.

sisk 12y ago

You might not need them but consider this for a moment: When I was a kid, there was a boy in my class who was mute. He carried a chalkboard and flashcards to facilitate communication. Eventually, he was chosen to pilot a device that was sort of like a keyboard with oversized keys. Each key had a pictograph on it[0]. Wouldn't it be nice for him if the flashcards and keyboard device had a consistent set of characters that were easily recognizable not only by him but by the people with whom he was communicating? Now, would he ever need "MAN IN SUIT LEVITATING"? Probably not (you never know!) but I'm glad there is a standard set of otherwise useful pictographs for people like him. [0] - I'm in my late 20s but this was when few families owned computers, let alone super-helpful handheld devices. Also worth mentioning that this boy knew ASL but attended a regular public school where few students and faculty could so the chalkboard and flashcards were infinitely more practical.

buster 12y ago
And that device would have a keyboard with thousands of keys? Btw. that device exists today, and it's called a tablet. I'm pretty sure i have seen stuff exactly like that and it serves a great purpose. The consistent set of "characters" (pictures in this case) would still look very different on each device or application that uses another font. Because a banana in one font could look very different in another font. The only thing that actually would be consistent if the content he uses would use actual pictures! (A website displaying a banana on his touchpad can look different on his laptop, can't it?).