
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters - adamnemecek
http://unicodepowersymbol.com/we-did-it-how-a-comment-on-hackernews-lead-to-4-%C2%BD-new-unicode-characters/
======
pja
I got a change into Unicode 9.0 too!

It was just a tweak to emoji characters to mark them all as East Asian Full
Width instead of Narrow or Ambiguous so that they displayed correctly when
using a fixed width font in a terminal console. This probably only matters if
you like to use emoji filenames (you mad person), but it felt like a wart so I
reported it & had a short back and forth with the chair of the emoji-related
subcommittee which resulted in a proposal which was eventually accepted by the
committee into Unicode 9.0. The committee were great: took my tiny bug report
seriously, wrote huge long treatises to justify the change & eventually voted
it into the standard.

(This was pretty much my peak geek achievement of 2016 so far :) )

~~~
micro2588
Will this eventually solve the "Julia does not like Pizza" issue
([https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/3721](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/3721))?

~~~
KenoFischer
Ideally yes. I'd have to confirm that this extends to Pizza and Koalas. We
fixed that issue as much as we could, even going as far as generating our own
unicode width tables extracted from unifont, but it wasn't possible to fix in
general without support form the terminals. Now that the standard is fixed
(hopefully), I don't see a reason why the terminals wouldn't update their
tables.

------
kens
The success of the unicodepowersymbol proposal inspired me to suggest a couple
characters to Unicode (the Bitcoin sign and IBM's group mark from 1960s
mainframes, which were accepted). The point is that Unicode really is open to
proposals from random people; you don't need to part of a big company to
influence Unicode.

~~~
MichaelGG
You don't need to be part of a big company, but it certainly helps. Especially
if you want to stop a pentathalon or rifle character.

(Top result: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/rifle-emoji-dropped-
unicode-...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/rifle-emoji-dropped-
unicode-9-0-update-apple-microsoft-1.3645884))

~~~
jshevek
That's a shame.

Its one thing to have absolute, iron fisted control over your own platform -
its another to intentionally seek to limit people's self expression on other
platforms by influencing the standard in this way.

~~~
eridius
Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have
influence on what goes into Unicode? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if you
read the article, Apple wasn't the only party in favor of nixing the emoji.

~~~
zeveb
> Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to
> have influence on what goes into Unicode?

One might have a right to do something and yet be wrong to do it.

Apple had every right to do what they did, but they were completely, totally
and undeniably in the wrong to do it. Everyone associated with their action
should be ashamed. Honestly, they should all resign: their behaviour
demonstrates that they have no business being associated with this sort of
work.

~~~
eridius
Your comment is ridiculously extreme. They were not "undeniably" in the wrong.
You think they were wrong, but that is an highly subjective opinion. In fact,
I don't even agree that they were wrong to do this at all. I think it's
perfectly reasonable to argue against the inclusion of more gun imagery in
Unicode.

Also, if you think Apple was wrong, you must also think that Microsoft was
(they voiced support), and everyone else at the meeting who agreed with the
move. As the article says,

> _Davis confirmed to BBC News on Monday that "there was consensus to remove"
> the emojis, but that he couldn't comment on the details._

So it's clearly not just Apple that thought this was the appropriate move.

~~~
nv-vn
Just like how North Korea isn't "undeniably" wrong in censoring speech to such
an extreme. This is a very 1984-esque "solution" to a problem -- don't want to
acknowledge positive use of guns? Good news, we can just erase them from our
language! The way we treat emoji has some very serious similarities to
Newspeak.

~~~
eridius
That's absurd. Nobody's censoring anything here. Apple not wanting to add a
new gun emoji is in no way preventing you from talking about guns. Emoji isn't
a replacement for English and nobody is forcing you to "speak" in all emoji.

------
tangus
How did the Unicode Consortium turn around. I remember 10 years ago they were
refusing to add standard media icons because

>The scope of the Unicode Standard (and ISO/IEC 10646) does not extend to
encoding every symbol or sign that bears meaning in the world.

>This list has been round and round and round on this -- regular as clockwork,
about once a year, the topic comes up again. And I see no indication that the
UTC or WG2 are any closer to concluding that bunches of icons should start
being included in the _character_ encoding standards simply on the basis of
their being widespread and recognizable icons.

>Where is the defensible line between "Fast Forward" and "Women's Restroom" or
"Right Lane Merge Ahead" or "Danger Crocodiles No Swimming"?

([http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-
ml/y2005-m08/0371.h...](http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-
ml/y2005-m08/0371.html))

Now it looks they add whatever somebody thinks of. I guess it's related to the
liberation from the BMP.

~~~
kens
Unicode is supposed to include symbols that appear in "running text", not
standalone icons. So no on traffic signs for instance. (There are exceptions
for historical reasons. And emoji are a totally separate story.)

~~~
copperx
I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the
story for emoji?

~~~
kens
Emoji were added to Unicode for compatibility with various mobile phones, so
they would have a standard encoding. That's how Unicode ended up with the poop
emoji for example - they didn't sit around thinking "what we really need
is...". Since people really, really want more emoji, Unicode is sort of stuck
constantly adding more. If you want to propose new emoji, the rules are at
[http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection.html](http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection.html)

Text symbols (as opposed to emoji) have different rules. Basically, the symbol
needs to be used in "running text" (i.e. normal text), like "containers with
[recycling symbol] can be recycled" or "he bid 2[club]". Traffic signs for
example are not normally used in the middle of text, so they aren't encoded in
Unicode. To get the Bitcoin symbol encoded, I needed to show that it was used
in text, not just as a standalone icon. The full rules for symbols in Unicode
are at [http://www.unicode.org/pending/symbol-
guidelines.html](http://www.unicode.org/pending/symbol-guidelines.html)

For the snowman in particular, it was added to Unicode because it was a symbol
used in the character set for Japanese TV broadcasts, see
[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07391-n3341.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07391-n3341.pdf)

TL;DR: Don't argue "Why does Unicode have a poop emoji but no symbol for X?"
\- the rules are totally different for emoji and symbols.

Edit: does HN strip out arbitrary Unicode characters now? I originally had
Unicode characters in place of [recycling symbol] and [club], but they
disappeared when I submitted.

~~~
nitrogen
IIRC HN might have a character whitelist to prevent overloads of combining or
layout-altering characters, and not have to worry about the behavior of newly
added characters. There were some comment threads a few years ago that were
just stacks of hundreds of combining diacritics that would crash some
rendering engines and create odd decorated text on others.

------
hackuser
As the story mentions regarding the off symbol (a circle), there are many
visually identical code points that have different semantic meanings. But in
this case, they added an additional semantic meaning to an existing code
point.

So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic
meaning? Both? It depends? Something else?

I've tried to decipher that on my own and only learned that the answer to
these sorts of questions are complicated, because it's very complicated to
represent all written human language via one set of rules.

So I know some of the answers to my questions above, but I'm hoping someone
with real expertise can provide the fundamental rules/policies - if there are
any.

~~~
EdiX
> So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image?

Look it's pretty simple, every code point represents a semantic meaning,
except for:

1\. those characters who also encode the width of their visual image
(U+FF00..FFEF)

2\. the one that means 'unknown' (U+FFFD)

3\. those characters that change their visual representation depending on
their position in the word (U+FB50..U+FDFF,U+FE70..U+FEFF)

4\. those that change the visual image of another code point (U+FE00..U+FE0F)

5\. those characters that have a visual image as their semantic meaning (too
many to list)

6\. those that are designated to have no semantic meaning at all
(U+FDD0..U+FDEF)

7\. those that have a meaning only in pairs (U+D800..U+DFFF)

8\. miscellaneous

~~~
tragomaskhalos
Why does this list remind me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge)
? :)

~~~
EdiX
Because Unicode is the Celestial Consortium of Benevolent Encoding.

------
peterburkimsher
TIL that the SI units all have Unicode symbols. [http://www.marathon-
studios.com/unicode/categories/So/Other_...](http://www.marathon-
studios.com/unicode/categories/So/Other_Symbol)

If people actually used these, it would make searching text for formulae much
easier. Wikipedia editors and academic publishers, please note.

Also, there's no Unicode for screwdriver. Perhaps iFixit would like to
campaign for that?

Congratulations on getting the power symbols in! When @edent writes "Will
update ... when I stop dancing", was it "I got the power"?

~~~
legulere
The SI ones are for use together with Chinese/Japanese/Korean to fit together
with their square characters.

I don't see how using them for anything else would have any use. I never
searched for units when searching for formulas

------
agumonkey
I'm a bit confused about Unicode. It was a repository of linguistic symbols,
not raw symbols. More and more it looks like wingdings. Isn't this putting
burden on font support and Text processing (what's the lexicographic order of
such symbols, using the abstract name ?) ?

~~~
cheez
We may think that we are enlightened beings but the fact is that pictures
comprise a lot of how we communicate now and in the past. Are emojis that
different from hieroglyphics?

~~~
agumonkey
Don't confuse 'intelligence' and how you communicate. Math texts are "emoji"
fest with crude grammar but they represent subtle abstractions.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
masklinn
> 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.

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

~~~
coldtea
The above is real text used in countless device manuals.

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

------
yk
I already ranted about unicode earlier today, my main argument is, that
unicode is what happens if everybody qualified thinks: "That's a great idea,
of course you have to handle X and Y and Z and I just remember that I forgot
to fill out several warranty cards."

This blog post is a nice example, I have absolutely no idea how these new code
points are supposed to look like, since I only spend an afternoon to implement
the unicode best practices from the Arch wiki, instead of subscribing to some
unicode standard mailing list. (Except the one symbol which was redefined to a
symbol that does not carry the semantic meaning of "standby symbol" anywhere
outside of the unicode standard.)

In my opinion there are two ways forward, one burn the entire thing. Or
alternatively, force the unicode committee to produce an authoritative and
complete font, in triplicate, and in their own blood.

~~~
johncolanduoni
The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points:
[http://unicode.org/charts/](http://unicode.org/charts/). If you really wanted
you can make them into a font (most of them seem to be vectorized), but since
I'm guessing you see most of the added code points as useless why do you care
if they show up as boxes? What harm is this stuff causing or going to cause to
the standard? We have hundreds of thousands of unassigned code points.

Meanwhile, a lot of the "Ys and Zs" added to Unicode have proved to be
extremely useful. Unicode's math operator and letter-styling support is what
made MathJax (and more generally MathML) possible. They've also helped big
time when it comes to accessibility (e.g. screen readers) for mathematics on
the internet. Should we have shunted that off to another standard and made the
creators of screen readers completely restructure their offerings so they can
deal with Unicode characters and "Mathicode" characters? Assuming anyone
bothered to implement it, how would that be better than just adding a Unicode
category and spending a meager amount of space?

~~~
yk
Your answer illustrates my point perfectly, first the lack of a reasonable
fall back mechanism. Of course I can start a hex editor, get the utf-8
encoding and then look up the code point ( and theoretically add that
character to a open font). A default font would just ship with every OS out
there, and suddenly there would be a working fall back.

Second mathematical symbols, consider the case were I get a text file
considering mostly of ASCII 7 and some mathematical symbols which may render
as mathematical symbols or as Chinese characters, since there is no way to
specify the encoding in a text file and so I have to guess the encoding. (That
is not helped by the roughly 17 standardized encodings that mostly agree with
utf-8.)

~~~
leni536
> The Unicode tables include examples for all graphical code points:
> [http://unicode.org/charts/](http://unicode.org/charts/). If you really
> wanted you can make them into a font

No, last time I checked you are not legally allowed to do that.

~~~
yk
I checked your link, then I proceeded to the terms of service and IANAL there
they claim that all 'unicode software' is basically MIT licensed. (Please
check with a lawyer before you conclude that word is MIT licensed.)

~~~
leni536
Now check any random chart:

    
    
        Fonts
        The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be
        expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number
        of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts.
        See http://www.unicode.org/charts/fonts.html for a list.
        
        Terms of Use
        You may freely use these code charts for personal or internal business uses only. You may not incorporate them either
        wholly or in part into any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without express written permission from
        the Unicode Consortium. However, you may provide links to these charts.
        The fonts and font data used in production of these code charts may NOT be extracted, or used in any other way in any
        product or publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface owner(s).
        The Unicode Consortium is not liable for errors or omissions in this file or the standard itself. Information on characters
        added to the Unicode Standard since the publication of the most recent version of the Unicode Standard, as well as on
        characters currently being considered for addition to the Unicode Standard can be found on the Unicode web site.
    

Now you can try to track down the actual typeface owners one by one (this
alone seems hopeless) and even then I doubt that you can get permission from
all of them.

------
wooptoo
Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols?

I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things
like emoji, but having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible
waste.

What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?

~~~
onion2k
_having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste_

A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a
possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full.
Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a
_really_ long time.

If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's
up to the people who are members of the consortium to decide how they want to
spend their energy?

~~~
Bromskloss
> Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a
> really long time.

And then what? It's already 11% full.

~~~
marcosdumay
And then we expand it again, like we did at the earlier 2000's.

UTF8 will support it by default, UTF16 will stay broken, UTF32 will break, but
nobody uses the later.

~~~
Bromskloss
Ah, being able to expand and keep using UTF-8 sounds great.

I didn't know that UTF-16 was considered broken. In what way is it so?

~~~
marcosdumay
The original UTF-16 can only represent 65536 code points, what is less than
half the number of unicode codes today. It was broken at the expansion around
a decade ago.

There's a new, incompatible ("mostly compatible" may explain it better) UTF-16
encoding that represent all unicode codes, but well two formats with the same
name is even more broken than only a broken one.

UTF-32 will suffer the same fate as UTF-16 if unicode expands. And UTF-8 is
capable of representing an absolutely huge number of codes, requiring only
non-breaking extensions.

------
nabla9
At some point, someone realizes that there is need to standardize fixed
practical subset of Unicode that contains all essential symbols over the world
so that all devices that comply with the standard can __actually__ interchange
text in readable, printable and visually presentable form.

It's nice to have catalogue of symbols and tight encoding for them, but full
support of Unicode encoding has very little to do with support for Unicode in
an application.

🇦 🇧 🇨 🇩 🇪 🇫 🇬 🇭 🇮 🇯 🇰 🇱 🇲 🇳 🇴 🇵 🇶 🇷 🇸 🇹 🇺 🇻 🇼 🇽 🇾 🇿.

~~~
kozak
Basic Multilingual Plane?

~~~
gpderetta
Emoji are not in the BMP. Whether they are essential or not I'll leave it to
you :)

~~~
userbinator
Whether unintentionally or not, you've just illustrated why emoji aren't truly
essential.

But some characters not in the BMP I would consider very essential, like the
various Asian characters that didn't fit into the BMP.

------
c3t0
Congratulations! Following through all that work specially with a consortium
of such significance is great feat of perseverance.

Thank you for stepping up and making a difference.

~~~
edent
Thanks mate :-)

------
DiabloD3
The only problem I see is OSX/iOS, Windows, and Android don't ship with some
universal, but shitty, font that has every single last glyph ever, always
immediately updated to the new Unicode standard.

------
VMG
Hope pause/play/rewind etc come next: [http://fontawesome.io/icons/#video-
player](http://fontawesome.io/icons/#video-player)

~~~
nomercy400
You mean 0x23E9 to 0x23FA, just before these new power symbols? I only noticed
them because the unicode power symbol site has an image of what comes before
their symbols.

~~~
VMG
nice, TIL

[http://www.unicodemap.org/range/48/Miscellaneous_Technical/](http://www.unicodemap.org/range/48/Miscellaneous_Technical/)

------
dclowd9901
Unicode symbols... seems like we should've developed them the way languages
develop: start with the most important symbols, ones for food, water, shelter,
danger, etc, then expanded them into the abstract mess they are today.

~~~
rabboRubble
Emoji were not developed haphazardly. They evolved naturally in Japan, then
were adopted by the rest of the world. That is why there are so many Asia /
Japan themes in the standard emoji set. The problem is Westerners don't
understand the Japanese emotion behind the symbol. The symbol for bookbag
looks exactly like a Japanese school kid's backpack. It's why there is a
kimono. Bamboo wind chimes. Tsunami. Shinkansen... I could go on and on.

In some respect, they are getting jumbled up because of international
pressures for the base emoji set to be stretched into a be-all for the global
market. An example is Taco. There are tacos in Japan. They are hard to find
and when you do find one, you definitely don't want to eat one there. Mexican
food is one of the rare cuisines the Japanese don't do better.

------
piotrkubisa
I hope that ligatures will be more popularized than using characters like "½",
because it is very difficult to find them in text with standard ASCII
characters, i.e. in Firefox by typing 1/2 in quick find (ctrl+f).

~~~
Pxtl
I'm always wierded out by that, because it implies we should support the full
gamut of math - superscripted/subscripted text, large fractions, the text
above and below the epsilon in discrete sums, etc.

~~~
kps
½ ¼ ¾ are in Unicode because they're in ISO 8859. They're in ISO 8859 because
they appeared on a fair number of typewriters and metal fonts.

------
systemfreund
From the Unicode 9.0.0 announcement [0]:

> Important symbol additions include:

> 19 symbols for the new 4K TV standard

I am wondering, why did they add symbols for a standard which will become
obsolete eventually?

[0]:
[http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/](http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/)

~~~
paler
For the same reason that they also include symbols for many obsolete (dead)
languages and writing systems, as well as (per a comment above) a character
used by the 1959 IBM 1401 computer
([https://github.com/shirriff/groupmark](https://github.com/shirriff/groupmark)).
The need to be able to discuss a certain technology in writing does not
disappear just because it is out of general use.

------
bArray
Truly amamzing man!

I was actually wondering about the electrical symbols for logic gates, such as
AND, OR, NOR, XOR, NOT, etc. I would hope they were universally accepted by
now and would help when writing books or describing logic. A quick Duck Duck
search revealed nothing...?

~~~
nneonneo
Electrical symbols in general don't do so well when scaled down to the size of
text. Plus, it is very uncommon to encounter the electrical gate symbols
inline with text - usually the symbols are sitting in a separate circuit
diagram.

Nevertheless, Unicode does have all of the logical symbols from mathematics,
which are pretty commonly understood:

    
    
        ∧∨¬⊕

~~~
bArray
Before Unicode made it so, when was there a need for an ice cream or a poo
inline with the text? It's a way of expressing language.

------
baby
I was wondering why they would have snowmen in the language. And then it
occurred to me that maybe, since the unicode set has so much room for
characters, that they were planning to allow cross-language communication
through emoticons.

Think about it, if you can represent anything human with emoticons. Then you
can communicate through emoticons only! Maybe that's what the ancient
Egyptians were hopping for?

------
jgalt212
How long before we need a defusedunicode to protect users and programs from
confusion and scams?

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/defusedxml](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/defusedxml)

~~~
jloughry
Actually there is something like that in the internationalised DNS standards
(that is, internet domain names that look like .xn--xyz-abc sometimes and .日本
other times.) There's a blacklist of certain Unicode characters that are
disallowed in domain names because they resemble more commonly used
characters. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack)

------
singularity2001
I first thought they are the ones responsible for this 'character':

﷽ 65021 ﷽ FDFD ARABIC LIGATURE BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHEEM

[http://graphemica.com/%EF%B7%BD](http://graphemica.com/%EF%B7%BD)

------
WalterBright
I always wondered what was wrong with the glyph "ON" to denote on.

~~~
qbrass
It makes it harder to find the "OFF" button when it's marked "ON"

~~~
WalterBright
Use the glyph "OFF" for off.

Seriously, equipment has been marked ON and OFF for a hundred years. Is there
any evidence anyone was confused with this more than with O and | ?

~~~
function_seven
People who don't speak English?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol)

~~~
qbrass
You don't have to be able to read the word ON to recognize it as a symbol.
"Circle next to zigzag-thing" is as good as circle with line sticking out of
it.

~~~
WalterBright
There's also precedent. Continental Europe standardized on "STOP" on stop
signs back in the 70's, even though no continental language has "stop" in it.

~~~
merijnv
Excuse me? No continental European language has the word stop in it? You
should probably learn more languages before making claims like that.

Stop is a word in Dutch (the first recognisable use of the word I could find
dates back to 1287). And German has stopf. I couldn't find a date for that,
because my German isn't good enough to read their etymology dictionary, but
it's source is Old High Germanic, so it's safe to say that stop has been
around in continental Europe in Germanic languages since Medieval time at the
very least.

Edit: A quick further Google search reveals that Norwegian and Danish (and
thus most likely Sweden too) have the variation "stoppe" derived from Low
German.

Seems a bit disingenuous to claim it was adopted despite "not being an
existing word" if two languages use the exact rendering on the sign and 4
others use/have words that are so closely related that they have the same
spelling, but 1 or 2 additional letters.

Further edit: French apparently adopted the word stop from English... _in
1792_

~~~
dalke
In Swedish it's "stopp".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign#Stop_signs_around_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign#Stop_signs_around_the_world)
shows examples of "Stop" used in Germany and Italy in the 1950s.

The German Wikipedia, at
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoppschild](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoppschild)
, gives an example of "stop" used in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
(after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia) in 1939, though it says the
sign was an imported variant.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stoppen#German](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stoppen#German)
points out:

> As in Dutch stoppen, the sense “to stop” is figurative from water flow being
> stopped by plugging. Only in this figurative meaning has the form been
> adopted into standard German proper, under the reinforcing influence of
> English to stop.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stop](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stop)
gives a list of continental European languages where 'stop' is part of the
language. Nearly all borrow from the English. Not Dutch, however.

------
GauntletWizard
I'm still waiting for a Unicode codepoint for Love Symbol #2 (aka The Artist
Formerly Known as Prince). There are codepoints for dead Chinese emperors,
there should be one for Prince.

~~~
Jaruzel
It actually exists as an official font file published by Prince himself:

[http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-
floppy-...](http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-disk-
symbol-font.html)

I don't know the codepoint for it though. Does anyone (other than the guy
mentioned in the article) actually have this 'Prince Font' ?

~~~
scrollaway
The article says it replaces capital P (U+0050).

~~~
Jaruzel
Oh yeah, missed that bit! Obvious really.

------
acqq
Can anybody see how the characters look like? Wouldn't it be good to have the
pictures of all 4 and half? Some link?

I see there was a proposal here in PDF:

[https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode/raw/master/power_symbol_...](https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode/raw/master/power_symbol_proposal.pdf)

But there's a lot of glyphs there. What was accepted then? If the circle was
reused, what are the remaining four?

------
idanga
Takes a character to make a character :P

Well done.

------
rbanffy
Cool.

I'll add these (and the IBM-related symbols @kens mentioned, which are
specially appropriate) to
[https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font) for
the next release (this weekend, I think - still lots of Cyrillic cleanup to do
in the develop branch).

------
mirekrusin
Would they consider "fuck you" (middle finger) character? I think it would be
very useful and quite popular.

~~~
shabbyrobe
They already did!
[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f595/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f595/index.htm)

~~~
yrro
Only the right hand though?

~~~
adiabatty
That's font-dependent. There's nothing stopping you from making a font with a
left-handed one, though.

------
shurcooL
Nice! That looks like a long journey, so congrats on seeing it through and
being successful!

On a related note, the main character of my unfinished game [0] will be
pleased about this.

[0]
[https://github.com/shurcooL/eX0#readme](https://github.com/shurcooL/eX0#readme)

------
yingnansong
Thanks for making the contribution :)

------
lacker
Will there just eventually be one emoji for each distinct concept?

~~~
kalleboo
Time to just add Emoji as another CJK language
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs)

~~~
peterburkimsher
CJK stands for Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, and Korean.
Adding Emoji would make it:

Japanese, Oriental, Korean, and Emoji.

It's a bad JOKE.

------
xvilka
World also need better support for BiDirectional text in every kind of
software. Especially poor support in terminal emulators and console tools.

------
WalterBright
Where does adding new Unicode symbols stop?

~~~
function_seven
When there are no more to add or the symbol space is full. Until then, no
reason to halt it as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
scrollaway
That... is a terrible mindset.

When do we stop handing out IPv4s by the hundreds of thousands? "When we run
out". When do we stop doing 120km/h? "When we run out of road". When do we
stop spending money? "When we're flat out broke".

(Note: _I am not advocating for or against the unicode case, I 'm making a
point about the specific mindset used to justify this_)

~~~
function_seven
I phrased it rather crudely. I really meant "when there is no more to add".
With the caveat that running out is the other option.

I think the question represents an equally terrible mindset, "when do we
stop?" How can I answer that, honestly? Is there a number? Or is it when a
certain date has come and gone? How do we pick that number? Or that date? Why
do we need to stop? I understand why we might want to rate-limit the adoption
of new glyphs, but I don't see why we'd ever draw a line in the sand and say,
"Ok, now it's frozen." Imagine if that had happened before the creation of the
Euro as a currency.

~~~
scrollaway
Right, that's a much better way of seeing it and I don't disagree.

------
gerbilly
For all the animals they have in unicode(rabbit, hamster, cow, ...) how come
there is no squirrel?

~~~
lsaferite
I don't think they have a gerbil either.

------
ck2
Great work but the sheer amount of unicode is getting crazy.

Starting to think it should all just be svg

~~~
acdha
How would search work with SVG? What about support for screen readers or
translation? Having standard symbols like this means that all of those are
easily solved without needing something like an image classifier.

------
anhtran
I read this because the title reminds me about the latest release of Steven
Wilson.

------
EdiX
And yet still no klingon...

~~~
WorldMaker
I've been saying for a while now that the proposed conlang block (for Klingon,
Tolkien's Elvish scripts, et al) was shut down prior to expanding into the
Astral Plane and it's past time to revisit that proposal seeking a good spot
in the Astral Plane. Similar academic criteria used for encoding deceased and
historic languages can be applied to conlang proposals.

------
pookeh
IMO, this is "3½" more Unicode characters than required.

------
LELISOSKA
maybe there should be like a universal unicode for all the icons that apps
might need that represent common functionality and they should be animated to
represent an either on or off state for some of them. also top brand square
logos should be added into the unicode as well. and then different
forks/variations can be submitted for the unicode and be accepted if they are
useful and good looking. also they should all be black and white and have the
same theme/look similar. u like my idea?? :DD

~~~
mappu
[https://materialdesignicons.com/](https://materialdesignicons.com/) makes a
font available with a reasonably large selection of brand and functionality
icons, using unicode private ranges (also svg or whatever).

I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode.

~~~
Jaruzel
> I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode.

Seconded, brands come and go, as do their logos, many large corporations have
gone through several logo changes.

Pan-Am is the main one that springs to mind (or it's because I've just re-
watched Blade Runner AGAIN...)

~~~
dingo_bat
>several logo changes

So just change the font you use to render Unicode. The Unicode itself can
remain the same.

------
digi_owl
Emoji, the megapixels of messaging?

------
smegel
> Ask the people behind your Operating System and those who design your
> favourite fonts to start supporting Unicode 9!

Surely not every font has to create glyphs for every Unicode character...how
does that work? Is there a kind of "fall-back" font for characters not
implemented?

~~~
medgno
Systems have a way of finding fall-back fonts. At least on OS X (err, macOS)
they will satisfy glyph requests in order from the font you specify, some
built-in fonts, and then any fonts that have the required glyphs. Finally, a
"last resort" font is used to fill in any remaining glyphs[1].

A result of this is that if you ask for a character such as "𓀴" (U+13034
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A044) in a monospace font, the symbol you get back can be
variable width.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font)

~~~
the8472
I have a font for that, but the character is unreadably small while it's
perfectly fine for latin characters.

Many other unicode symbols also suffer from this problem. E.g. ␀ is the
printable version of the unprintable NUL (\0) control character, but it's so
small at 13.3px / 10pt CSS font size that it's difficult to distinguish from
the other control pictures.

␀ ␁ ␂ ␃ ␄ ␅ ␆ ␇ ␈ ␉ ␊ ␋ ␌ ␍ ␎ ␏ ␐ ␑ ␒ ␓ ␔ ␕ ␖ ␗ ␘ ␙ ␚ ␛ ␜ ␝ ␞ ␟ ␠ ␡

How those look on display w/o pixel scaling:
[https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png](https://i.imgur.com/lAAyjXu.png)

~~~
sscotth
Imagine if ﷽ was sized to a monospace font.

~~~
chme
In the name of god, that has to be the most complex glyph I have ever seen.

~~~
legulere
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#/media/Fi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#/media/File%3ABiáng_\(regular_script\).svg)

Biang from Biang biang noodles is also fairly complex (though not supported by
Unicode)

~~~
ojii
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Taito_1....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Taito_1.svg)

"appearance of a dragon in flight"

------
bsder
The past tense of "lead" (rhymes with bead) is not also "lead".

When did the word "led" disappear from the English language?

~~~
dang
We fixed it in the title above. Don't forget that we're fortunate enough to
have a great many non-native English speakers here.

~~~
bsder
The "native" English speakers are actually some of the worst offenders.

I want to strangle "reporters" who write articles for the NYT, Washington
Post, etc. who get this wrong all the time.

------
bbcbasic
&#x23FB; To The People!

------
yuhong
I wonder when will Windows add support?

------
gcb0
was this a clever ploy from the awful-and-unusable-incident-management-system-
as-a-service i have to use at my job whose logo is ⏻?

------
andrewclunn
ᛈοοו

------
krapp
I wonder if HN is going to complain about the frivolity and uselessness of
these the way they incessantly complain about emoji every time a Unicode
thread comes up?

