3 ms·

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

by 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.
    - buster 12y ago
      Oh, the irony: http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg That's pretty much my point.
      - sho_hn 12y ago
        For the record, the example was a Chinese character, which qualifies as "normal" according to the rulebook you set up. It's in active use in Mandarin and Japanese, and I'd think recognizable to many others (e.g. Cantonese readers or Koreans and Vietnamese). And it'll certainly show just fine on the default installs of most systems on the market right now. http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7CAA http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C... You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.
        buster 12y ago
        The point is that it will never happen that all codepoints are available everywhere (every font, evers OS, every device), and i certainly don't want a gazillion of pictures loaded on my smartphones little memory, just because some people think it necessary to have a symbol for poop in fonts which is never used anyway. I even consider it a total waste in my laptops 16GB of memory, to be honest. It's not a waste when it serves the real purpose of a language. A chinese word for poop? Sure. A picture of actual poop? No. And where does it stop? Can i have some dog poop and cat poop codepoints please? I'm sure elephant poop looks very different to cat poop, i want a code point for that too. I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.

by buster 12y ago

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.
  - buster 12y ago
    Oh, the irony: http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg http://oi60.tinypic.com/21o111t.jpg That's pretty much my point.
    - sho_hn 12y ago
      For the record, the example was a Chinese character, which qualifies as "normal" according to the rulebook you set up. It's in active use in Mandarin and Japanese, and I'd think recognizable to many others (e.g. Cantonese readers or Koreans and Vietnamese). And it'll certainly show just fine on the default installs of most systems on the market right now. http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7CAA http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C... You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.
      - buster 12y ago
        The point is that it will never happen that all codepoints are available everywhere (every font, evers OS, every device), and i certainly don't want a gazillion of pictures loaded on my smartphones little memory, just because some people think it necessary to have a symbol for poop in fonts which is never used anyway. I even consider it a total waste in my laptops 16GB of memory, to be honest. It's not a waste when it serves the real purpose of a language. A chinese word for poop? Sure. A picture of actual poop? No. And where does it stop? Can i have some dog poop and cat poop codepoints please? I'm sure elephant poop looks very different to cat poop, i want a code point for that too. I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.