

Unicode Character 'Slice of Pizza' - glamp
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/index.htm

======
comex
I don't think Unicode emoji make sense in the long run - even if they're handy
in SMS, and fun to scatter around normal text boxes, it would be better to use
chat protocols with their own sets of consistent emoticons (as, indeed, many
mobile messaging apps have). Why?

(a) Details matter. It doesn't matter if my 'A' displays in a different font
on your phone, but the difference between Apple's colorful, pixelated, Space
Invaders-like rendering of
<http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F47E/index.htm> and the server-
generated image's outlined round tentacle monster is fairly significant.

(b) Emoticons (at least those beyond the core set) are things of fashion: we
always want more, but old ones go out of style. Though depictions can change,
we're going to be stuck with the current list of Unicode emoji forever.

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kennywinker
Emoji is such a weird thing. On one hand, I use them constantly for IMing. A
quick 👍 is 10x better than the single-character "K" response in terms of
expressiveness and playfulness.

On the other hand, the symbol coverage seems very random to my western brain.
For example, there are three different mounds of rice, but no tacos. Nine
different commuter trains, but no motorcycle. Also, the seemingly random
assortment of flags.

I know this is a result of their Japanese origins, but if I had my druthers,
emoji would be a little more inclusive, and then phones would have a little
emoji-editor where you could edit your keyboards so they only included the
symbols you wanted to use.

~~~
Mindless2112
For anyone else who just sees a square:
<http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f44d/>

~~~
gee_totes
_Why_ do I see a square?

It is because of the encoding format on HN? Or because my browser's built in
fonts don't have all the Unicodes?

~~~
gcr
It's not a character set issue. It's just that _none_ of your fonts have that
glyph.

I'm on Linux, but after installing the symbola font (Arch package: `ttf-
symbola`) and restarting firefox, the square turns into the proper thumbs up
sign.

~~~
jtchang
What do I install on Ubuntu 10.04?

~~~
loevborg
On Ubuntu, try:

    
    
       mkdir -p ~/.fonts && wget -O /tmp/symbola.zip 'http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola708.zip' && unzip -j -d ~/.fonts /tmp/symbola.zip Symbola.ttf
    

Restart Chrome. It should work on 10.04 or later (and possibly in earlier
versions as well).

------
peterkelly
Fun story about emoji and unicode:

I have a writing app I've developed for iOS, and a while ago received a bug
report from someone saying the app crashed every time they tried to open their
document. I couldn't figure out what was going on but after eventually
receiving a copy of the document, I discovered that the crash was due to my
incorrect handling of emoji characters.

Most string classes, including NSString in iOS, typically represent strings as
sequences of 16-bit characters. With 65,536 possible combinations, this is
perfectly adequate to support the characters from all major languages in use
worldwide [1], plus emoji. Unicode does however allow for values outside of
this range, which are represented by "surrogate" pairs of 16-bit values in the
range D800-DFFF. It was these I was handling incorrectly, and had missed in my
testing.

But if there's space in the 0-65,535 range to represent emoji, why would it be
stored outside of this? Well, it turns out that the initial implementation of
emoji in iOS used the "private use area" of this range to encode the character
values [2]. NTT DoCoMo also had their own (incompatible) way of encoding emoji
in the private use area [3]. When attempts were made to formally standardise
on emoji in unicode, they couldn't use the private use area, and ended up
going with values above 65,535.

If unicode had stuck to representing existing characters and symbols and said
no to requests for stuff like emoji and klingon, string representation in
modern software could have been kept a whole lot simpler.

Joel Spolsky has an excellent explanation of unicode and encoding issues here:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

[1] To the best of my knowledge; correct me if I'm wrong

[2] <http://openradar.appspot.com/6402446>

[3]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080216230900/http://www.nttdoco...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080216230900/http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/pictograph/basic/index.html)

~~~
vorg
> With 65,536 possible combinations, this is perfectly adequate to support the
> characters from all major languages in use worldwide [1]

It depends on how you represent characters. Korean Hangul represents each
square shape separately so requires over 10,000 characters. If it hadn't been
like that, Korea wouldn't have accepted Unicode for use because it would have
multiplied the number of bytes required to represent characters from their
existing system. There's 10,000 Japanese/Chinese Kanji in modern use, plus
another less commonly used 65,000 encoded, and there's no consistent way to
represent them as components.

> If unicode had stuck to representing existing characters and symbols and
> said no to requests for stuff like emoji and klingon, string representation
> in modern software could have been kept a whole lot simpler.

Klingon was rejected for encoding by the Unicode Consortium in 1997, and
remains excluded to this day.

emoji was included as a political nod to the Japanese, who even today are the
main holdouts to Unicode being the exclusive code for worldwide use.

------
Pengwin
Ive always found this amusing: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%F0%9F%8D%95>

~~~
cpeterso
I was staring at this article for 30+ seconds before I got it! <:)

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glurgh
These are to support emoji symbols in Unicode. There's a lot in there beside
pizza - party poppers, wedding chapels, game console controllers, "information
desk person" and the ever mysterious "Japanese goblin".

PDF chart at

<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf>

for the full glory of it all.

------
kps
Unicode needs a character for jumping a shark.

~~~
eclipticplane
How so? These emoji characters are in widespread use. The initial characters
had competing standards amongst Japanese providers. The unicode adoption
allows indexing and searching without encoding problems. The competing
standards also defined different glyphs, which feels like going back to the
80s or 90s with character pages.

Also, we can't jump a shark in Unicode, but we do have a few lovely 🐋 🐳 whales
for you to jump if you'd like.

~~~
rangibaby
The only time I've seen whale here, it looked like this:🍣

I'm glad emoji have been standardized. Back in the dumbphone days each carrier
had their own set of characters, meaning the smiley face you sent😘 might have
come out as a piece of poo...

------
GregorStocks
Counterpoint: <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm>

~~~
onan_barbarian
My first reaction to this story was "if you liked 'slice of pizza', you'll
love 'pile of poo'". Good to see someone got there first.

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tantalor
Might be a good time to plug <http://codepoint.tumblr.com/>

I haven't touched it in years as you can see, but it was fun while it lasted.

------
twistedpair
I wonder how many "unicode complete" fonts exist. It must be nearly impossible
to meet the entire spec.

~~~
dietrichepp
GNU Unifont covers the entire BMP. Every character in the BMP has an 8x16 or
16x16 bitmap in the font.

A "unicode complete" font is more of a novelty than anything else. For real
work, pick a collection of fonts that cover the space you need. Good Arabic or
Chinese fonts are not going to be great Latin fonts. For that matter, good
Chinese fonts are not good Japanese fonts, even if coverage is good enough. In
fact, the order of precedence that these fonts have will depend on which
language is the primary language. If you're typesetting Japanese with Latin
characters, then you can just pick a nice Mincho font, but Mincho has
unnatural spacing if your audience has native English readers. (So if you
quote Japanese in an English text, pick a Latin font and use Mincho for the
Japanese; but if you quote English in a Japanese text, you can use Mincho for
everything.)

It's hard enough just to find a good Latin font that also has a good set of
mathematical symbols. "Computer Modern" of course, and "Times", but these sets
are rare.

~~~
evadne
Adobe InDesign and Illustrator support composite fonts. Designers can mix and
match Latin and Japanese / CJK glyphs, tweak them individually, and use
overrides for tricky code points.

Web typography is a different beast because fonts can be bloat-y.

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ihuman
Interesting. In Google Chome, I just see squares where the character should
be. However, if I copy and paste it into the url bar, or anywhere else in OSX,
I see a color picture of a pizza.

~~~
deefour
I see it just fine in OSX through Chrome, Version 27.0.1453.93

~~~
city41
Which version of OSX? I'm on Mountain Lion and Chrome 27.0.1453.93 as well,
and they are just boxes for me.

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bluetooth
I find this unicode character more entertaining: 🏩

(It's a "love hotel", one character away from a regular hotel, 🏨)

~~~
brendannee
<http://unicodelovehotel.com/>

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hcarvalhoalves
<http://jsfiddle.net/eYCrN/3/>

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adregan
I recommend setting your terminal's hostname to an emoji for maximum fun.

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leeoniya
looks different for me here
[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/browserte...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/browsertest.htm)

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sb057
I'm a personal fan of the STATUE OF LIBERTY: 🗽

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advisedwang
For the lazy: 🍕

