
Every character has a story: U+213a (rotated Q) (2005) - robin_reala
https://web.archive.org/web/20060909235709/http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/349769.aspx
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throw0101a
Per the article, U+213a ('℺') is part of ISO 5426-2:

> _ISO 5426-2 is a second part to ISO 5426, published in 1996.[4] It specifies
> a set of 70 characters, some of which do not exist in Unicode. Michael
> Everson proposed the missing characters in Unicode 3.0, but some were
> postponed for further study. Later, new evidence was found, and more was
> encoded. P with belt is probably an error for P with flourish.[5]_

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_5426](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_5426)

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asveikau
I am not seeing in the article what the rotated Q is used for: what
language(s), what phonetic value, etc.

Found this:
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%BA](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%BA)

> Used by publishers as a signature mark on the bindings of printed books

I don't think I am familiar with this use.

~~~
jcranmer
It's not a phonetic letter; it's a symbol.

The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another
character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to
"minor printing mark," the sort of role that would cause it to be rejected if
someone proposed it as a Unicode character de novo.

~~~
derefr
> The real short of it is that it's a character that existed in another
> character set, and its role in that character set appears to be limited to
> "minor printing mark,"

Not really. The _printing mark itself_ wasn’t a “character” in any character
set until Unicode. It was probably a custom SVG-like shape that could be
plopped into the margin of the document in desktop-publishing programs; sort
of like drawing any other arbitrary vector shape (e.g. a 13-agon.) In
specialized desktop-publishing programs (e.g. musical-score “engraving”
programs), all sorts of these custom vector-shape symbols come with the system
for placement onto the document; but—until very recently†—these weren’t “text”
in any sense, just shapes.

† [https://blog.dorico.com/2013/05/introducing-bravura-music-
fo...](https://blog.dorico.com/2013/05/introducing-bravura-music-font/)

What _was_ a character in a character set (ISO 5426-2) was a sort of
“reference to said printing mark” or “exemplar of said printing mark”, used
once in a standards document to give examples of how printing marks are used.
Note the difference: the printing mark _itself_ is an arbitrarily-complex and
varied shape that different desktop-publishing programs might render in all
sorts of ways. The “reference to the printing mark” is one mark that appears
in the standards document, one way. (Picture the difference between an actual
calligraphic flourish separating passages of text, and a Unicode
fleuron/heart-bullet. One is not the proper encoding of the other! The former
is a _shape_ , not a character per se. The latter _is_ a character: it’s a
standard shape-thing with a standard meaning, that _communicates_ meaning, and
is considered “part of” the text.)

Unicode’s mission statement is essentially to offer an encoding for the set of
all _characters_ needed to losslessly re-encode all document-corpuses
(corpii?) of historical importance, such that those corpuses may be _re-
encoded_ into Unicode for archival purposes, with the Unicode standard then
acting as the record-keeper of the semantic meaning of the characters used in
those documents. Without this work, over time we’d lose the semantic meanings
of those _encoded characters_ , as the original living systems that
represented the encoding began to rot/disappear. We’d just be left with opaque
bytes in the middle of a document that we’d have to guess at the meaning at.

The printing mark, as used for its intended purpose, doesn’t meet Unicode’s
mission statement, because nobody’s encoding it _into_ a (preserved) document,
only “drawing” it on page-edges before trimming them off. It’s not “text” per
se. It doesn’t appear in any electronic stream-of-text in need of archival
preservation. It exists only in the same way an image embedded in a Word
document exists: as self-contained data interpretable by the document-
publishing system, an “add-on” on top of the text, but without the meaning of
the text _depending on_ the image. The document-publishing system “brings
together” a text source, and other data, to create a final “layout” that is
more than just text per se. The _text source_ , not the final layout, is what
Unicode is concerned about.

But the “exemplar of the printing mark” ended up in a _standard_ about
document binding. And _that_ glyph _is_ “text”, in the same sense that an
emoji is text — i.e. it’s part of the corpus that Unicode seeks to preserve,
in order to preserve the meaning of the text surrounding it. So it must treat
the mark _there_ as a character.

(Yes, this means that if a text of historical importance has some odd squiggle
in the middle of it — and it then talks about the squiggle — that squiggle
will inevitably become part of Unicode. That doesn’t imply that a visual for
the glyph will be drawn by every font artist, though! Just that Unicode will
retain a codepoint defining it in the standard, to _document_ the meaning of
the glyph as it appears in that one archived document. It’ll likely appear as
a replacement-box character, but people can go look up in the standard what
that particular replacement-box character means, and that’s all a historian
needs.)

~~~
jcranmer
> It likely wasn’t a “character” in any character set until Unicode.

The article expressly states:

> The proximate cause for the encoding of this character was the need to
> provide roundtrip mapping for encoded characters in ISO 5426-2:1996

What is ISO 5426-2, if not a character set?

~~~
derefr
You misunderstand. ISO 5426-2 is a standard specifying the encoding previously
used for the text of the _standard_ ; it isn’t the encoding used by the
desktop-publishing programs themselves that said standard refers to/affects.
(After all, the standard is only tangentially “about” desktop-publishing.)

In the context of the standards document and its accompanying encoding, yes,
sideways-Q — the exemplar of the mark — is already a defined character; and so
Unicode could just adopt it directly from that source character-set.

But my point was twofold:

1\. in the _source desktop-publishing files_ that the standard _documents_ ,
sideways-Q _isn’t_ a character. It’s an embeddable shape. This shape is the
‘reality’ to which the character in the standard is a reference. Like the
difference between a real floppy disk, and the floppy-disk emoji. Making it
out to be one would be like encoding a game of hangman drawn on a page as a
standard “hangman glyph.” Not the same! Loses meaning!

2\. Even if the standards document _didn’t_ have its own character set where
sideways-Q was defined as a character, but instead just took a particular
desktop-publishing program’s sideways-Q shape and plopped it inline into the
text — the fact that the text _refers to the mark, requiring you to be able to
see the rendering of the glyph to know what it was talking about_ means that
_that_ “sideways-Q exemplar” would inevitably become a Unicode codepoint, in
order to encode this document successfully. (In fact, if the standards
document were entirely-analogue, e.g. typewritten; and the sideways-Q were
drawn onto the page after the fact; then it’d _still_ make it into Unicode in
the process of digitizing the work.)

~~~
zerocrates
Okay, so I think we agree that ISO 5426-2 is a character set... are you saying
that it's a character set invented solely to encode its own standard document,
or some predecessor standard? Or you're possibly saying that it was only
included in Unicode to facilitate representing the ISO 5426-2 standard
document as Unicode?

Do you have some particular knowledge/reason for saying so? Other than your
comments I can't find any evidence to this effect... maybe I'm simply
misunderstanding you. I don't see anything that leads me to believe this was
the rationale behind either the creation of the original standard or its
inclusion in Unicode.

The sideways Q specifically, like most of this particular set, seems to
originate from a British Library internal character set, was included in the
earlier 5426-2 set, and from there into Unicode, with the primary interest
throughout focusing on bibliographic records, i.e., MARC.

The bit about the difference between the character and the shape/glyph is fine
as far as it goes (and does matter here as these older standards didn't really
follow that separation) but is similarly true for all of Unicode.

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gus_massa
IIUC the original was moved (aka erased) in a big reorganization of the blogs
of Microsoft. I think this is the new version hosted by the author
[http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/34976...](http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/349769.html)

~~~
bzb3
No, his blog was deleted when they fired him (I don't remember the details).
Also, he's been dead for a few years now.

Both things are a shame because I liked his blog a lot (along with Chen's)

~~~
austincheney
Not knowing any of this I looked it up.
[https://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/](https://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/)

It seems, according to Michael Kaplan, that he was fired from Microsoft for
taking a photo with a personal camera of a framed plaque of a patent
certificate with his name on it where the patent number was too visible. That
is some horrid garbage.

Having gone through the corporate patent game myself it’s not something I
would ever recommend.

~~~
adrianmsmith
I just googled and came up with the same result.

Does anyone know why taking a photo of a patent (with the patent number
visible) would be a fireable offence? I thought patents were public?

~~~
jcranmer
His blog post said "The second one was after I was granted a patent that I
honestly believed never should have been issued." If he posted the photo of
the patent in an article where he simultaneously made that remark, that
combination would be extremely damning evidence in any patent trial and could
lead to the invalidation of the patent.

Although, on re-reading his statement, the firing wasn't the taking a picture
of a patent, but including some ("infamous") art in another blog post.

~~~
jjjjoe
The "infamous art" was a red screen of death from a beta copy of Windows
Longhorn. Apparently the blog post was in the middle of the negative news
cycle about Longhorn and his posting the RSOD didn't help.

That blog article is available at
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170623173912/http://archives.m...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170623173912/http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/415335.html)

He blogged about it ten years later at
[http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2015/09/04/87706...](http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2015/09/04/8770668856267197190.html)

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ncmncm
Guessing that printers originally picked the Q because (in some face) the plug
was square, so fit in a frame sideways.

~~~
Taniwha
My guess too, also because Q doesn't get used much so there's probably one
spare in the box

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DonHopkins
Is there also a Unicode encoding for the invisible interjection "fnord"? I
tried looking it up in the Unicode dictionary but could not find it, but maybe
I'm just not seeing it...

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

>In the novel trilogy (and the plays), the interjection "fnord" is given
hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children
in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord".
For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously
generates a feeling of unease and confusion, preventing rational consideration
of the text it appears in. The uneasiness and confusion create a perpetual
low-level state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise
that a fearful populace keeps them in power.

>In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords—occurrences of the word "fnord"—are
scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and
anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the
advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. The exclusion of the text
from rational consciousness also enables the Illuminati to publish messages to
each other in newspapers, etc., without fear that other people will be aware
of them. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for
this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see
the actual word.

[...]

>Paulo Goode, a typeface designer from West Cork, Ireland, created a humanist
serif font named Fnord in 2016 which contains 23 fonts in five weights. The
geometry of the upper case ‘O’ is drawn on an axis of 23 degrees while the
lower case ‘o’ falls on a 17-degree axis. The 23 / 17 numerology is reflective
of similar numerical themes from The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

------
raldi
℺

