How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Animats on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:32AM (#11959042)

But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by lifthrasiir on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:41AM (#11959070)

I believe they are much more legitimate symbols to put to Unicode than Emoji. They are standardized (IEEE 1621), they frequently appear in the running text (of particular kind, but widespread enough), and they have distinct semantics from existing characters and symbols. In terms of worthiness they are on par with math symbols, enough for justifying the inclusion.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Ruud-v-A on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:48AM (#11959442)

I hear you. If you want pictures then use a markup language. Unfortunately it is too late now. We finally had an almost universally supported character set, and then we ruined it with levitating men in business suits. Recent Unicode versions introduce far more technical challenges than they solve. For instance, now that code points can come with colour, there are conflicting requirements between the requested text colour and the intrinsic colour of a symbol.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by slapresta on Thursday June 23, 2016 @05:14AM (#11959712)

This is about icon fonts and font rendering and has nothing to do with Unicode. Code points don't have colour; there's no colour requirements anywhere in the spec.

Your fonts don't have to support the entirety of Unicode. That's why we have font stacks and fallbacks.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Ruud-v-A on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:49AM (#11960036)

U+1F499 BLUE HEART U+1F49A GREEN HEART U+1F49B YELLOW HEART U+1F49C PURPLE HEART U+1F53D DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE U+1F536 LARGE ORANGE DIAMOND U+1F537 LARGE BLUE DIAMOND ...

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by slapresta on Friday June 24, 2016 @06:00PM (#11973839)

That doesn't directly translate to a color requirement in the font, though.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by anonymfus on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:01AM (#11959843)

Except skin colours which are now modifiers.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by masklinn on Thursday June 23, 2016 @02:51AM (#11959293)

> Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence

"To start the device, press the ⏻ button on the device face"

There, used in a sentence.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Scea91 on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:07AM (#11959345)

"Good morning, that's a nice tnetennba" (Source: https://youtu.be/49UakIHb1yI)

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Bromskloss on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:27AM (#11959933)

I'm not sure. It sounds like we would then have to include every possible image.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by coldtea on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:54AM (#11960065)

The above is real text used in countless device manuals.

"Every possible image" (e.g. an elephant icon in running text) is not.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by onion2k on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:18AM (#11959379)

Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.

A standard clip art library that covers universally understood symbols sounds like something that would be very useful.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by lmm on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:12AM (#11959508)

It absolutely would be. But it should not be part of a plain text format.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by onion2k on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:11AM (#11959875)

But it should not be part of a plain text format.

What is "plain text format" though? If 'text' isn't limited to Western ASCII characters (which it very obviously shouldn't be considering many people use other character sets), then the idea of a text standard should be to encode all the glyphs people use, so "plain text format" becomes a canonical list of all the communicative symbols in all languages. That's what Unicode aims to be.

In my opinion, if they're used for communication, it doesn't seem unreasonable that such a canon of characters should include universal iconographic symbols like the standby icon.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by jasonszhao on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:36AM (#11959055)

If I understand correctly, Unicode only provides the semantic meaning, not the actual rendering. The font provides information for how to render it. Am I right?

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by valleyer on Thursday June 23, 2016 @03:22AM (#11959385)

Yes, though they provide guidance on how they should look, and in most cases, there is only one font on the system that has a glyph for some of these more esoteric code points, and it usually provides a reasonable representation.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by bbcbasic on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:34AM (#11959048)

ఠ_ఠ don't say that

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by sthatipamala on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:39AM (#11959063)

The eyes in your emoticon are actually the letter 'ta' in Telugu, a regional Indian language.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by tlrobinson on Thursday June 23, 2016 @01:41AM (#11959072)

ಠ_ಠ

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by acqq on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:45AM (#11960011)

Wow, the Japanese really spend a lot of time inventing these combinations: http://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-emoticons/

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