
New Twitter Code For Retweet: ♺ - Tichy
http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2009/01/new-twitter-cod.html
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JoelSutherland
An inconvenient solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Aside from the dubious claim that this is "more distintive" can somebody
explain the point to me?

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jacobscott
I guess I can now sympathize with everyone who complained about too many
econ/politics/non-ruby/xyz posts to HN.

Front page story about a suggested change from 'RT' --> '♺' on twitter? If I
had less faith in HN I would label this a jump the shark moment.

~~~
Tichy
It definitely belongs in the "just for fun" category.

~~~
jacobscott
I guess there's nothing super-wrong with posting links like this, my surprise
was more that it got so many upvotes.

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riklomas
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer using "RT" as it's pretty easy to type,
it's in popular usage on Twitter (so no need to explain the crazy recycling
symbol), plus it's only one extra letter

~~~
sh1mmer
_"RT" as it's pretty easy to type_

That's pretty much it. Anything that I can't type on a Mac using alt and
possibly shift is pretty out there.

Not only that but who the heck has access to that unicode symbol on a cell
phone?

~~~
sdfx
Not just that, a lot of computer can't even display it correctly. Maybe
twitter could auto-replace it with a small image of the sign, but that might
break some twitter applications.

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GHFigs
Fail. 'RECYCLING SYMBOL FOR GENERIC MATERIALS' (U+267A) is not generally
available on platforms other than Mac OS X. On that platform it is only
provided by the system font Apple Symbols (as a fallback) and versions of the
included Japanese font Hiragino (what you're actually seeing). It is not
included in Arial Unicode MS on Windows, which in turn is irrelevant as Arial
Unicode MS is only included with Office, and (sigh) Mac OS X.

From looking at the Vista fonts I have available, it doesn't appear to be
available there either. If it does work, I'd be curious to know what fonts
it's provided by.

Let this be a lesson: Don't use weird Unicode characters unless you know that
everyone that needs to see them can see them.

FWIW, if you can't stand the little blank boxes, here's a Free font set that
covers most of Unicode: <http://dejavu-fonts.org/>

~~~
delvis
I found this app which you can use to find out which of your local fonts
support a given symbol:

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm?te...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm?text=%E2%99%BA+-+Unicode+Character+%27RECYCLING+SYMBOL+FOR+GENERIC+MATERIALS%27+\(U%2B267A\))

On my Vista system, the 0x267a (recycling) symbol is supported by "Malgun
Gothic", "Meiryo", "Microsoft JhengHei", "Microsoft YaHei", and "Segoe UI".

Not sure which of these are always available.

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callmeed
If I can't do it on my iPhone (via Tweetie) ... forget it

~~~
sdfx
You could just copy and paste it from an other message - oh, wait...

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pierrefar
Just because "recycle" and "retweet" both start with "re" does not mean that
the recycle symbol can be co-opted for retweeting.

But, meh, it's catching on and it's part of the evolution of language. Soon
we'll all be speaking Twitterese.

kthxbai.

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est
looks like a square on my WinSvr2k8Std. Any screenshots?

~~~
whacked_new
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol>

Of course this doesn't give you the _full experience_ of unicode! But that is
in fact what it is.

~~~
andreyf
♲ ≠ ♺

~~~
whacked_new
I pulled a wishy-washy. You caught me.

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thwarted
It may be one less "character" than RT, but it is one more byte in UTF-8. 0xE2
0x99 0xBA. What does twitter mean with the "140 character" limit, what's a
character here? I mean, <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>
was written in 2003.

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vasudeva
It's probably telling that I can't get the character to display properly in
any interface... but whether of the practicality of the suggestion, or the
level of my char-fu, I'm not sure.

~~~
Tichy
I don't know how to type it yet, either... ;-) But it looks nice.

~~~
axod
♳ ♴ ♵ ♶ ♷ ♸ ♹ ♺ ♻ ♲ ♼ ♽

Just copy+paste ;)

On OS X, you can enable the Character Palette which is extremely handly for
inputting unicode.

Settings->International->Input menu->Character Palette[Check]

~~~
vasudeva
Nope, just little blocks. Some interfaces display it as one solid dark
monolith, some as empty squares, and a special few as festive little glyphs
with mysterious markings inside. (XP SP2, every browser under the sun and then
some.)

~~~
likpok
You probably just need to track down the right font that has them.

~~~
eli
Sure, because everyone wants to have to mess with their global font settings
in order to use a website properly

~~~
likpok
Probably true, but it shouldn't be that difficult to set up a unicode font as
a fallback for all other fonts.

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wavesplash
Stowe Boyd is showing his lack of a tech background here. The recycle symbol
is 1 byte longer in UTF8 encoding and nobody on Windows can read it. I call
Fail.

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nx
Too bad most of Windows users won't be able to see it correctly. And too bad
those are the vast majority of Twitter users. (And it's complicated to type
in.)

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alaskamiller
I rather save space with interrobang: ‽

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ivankirigin
lots of clients don't render unicode well. I think TweetDeck doesn't show the
rest of the message after barfing on unicode, meaning instead of a retweet
you'd just get a blank tweet. RT is standard

