6 ms·

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.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        Are you suggesting we turn falling into a specific set of relationships between symbols an entry requirement for the Unicode database, though? How would that look like in practice? I agree you're highlighting a useful difference, but I'm not sure about implications.
        meepmorp 12y ago
        Nah, I think keeping unicode as "characters" is fine. It's perfectly reasonable to encode non-linguistic data as characters if they're using in such wise. Edit: to circle back, you said: How are emoji different from other logograms? and everything thereafter was pointless pedantry on my part. Sorry for wasting valuable minutes of your life.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        No waste at all, you raised a good point :). Emoji are technically ideograms, not logograms ... though some of the Han characters are ideographic in origin/conception too (and then you get into cool things like compound ideograms), they just didn't stay purely ideographic.
      - 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...

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.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        Are you suggesting we turn falling into a specific set of relationships between symbols an entry requirement for the Unicode database, though? How would that look like in practice? I agree you're highlighting a useful difference, but I'm not sure about implications.
        meepmorp 12y ago
        Nah, I think keeping unicode as "characters" is fine. It's perfectly reasonable to encode non-linguistic data as characters if they're using in such wise. Edit: to circle back, you said: How are emoji different from other logograms? and everything thereafter was pointless pedantry on my part. Sorry for wasting valuable minutes of your life.
        sho_hn 12y ago
        No waste at all, you raised a good point :). Emoji are technically ideograms, not logograms ... though some of the Han characters are ideographic in origin/conception too (and then you get into cool things like compound ideograms), they just didn't stay purely ideographic.
    - 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...