[HN Gopher] Unicode Proposal - Textile Care Symbols
___________________________________________________________________
Unicode Proposal - Textile Care Symbols
Author : peterburkimsher
Score : 412 points
Date : 2021-04-22 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| _Standard_ Textile Care Symbols? There is an actual standard for
| that?
|
| It's a serious question. As far as I can tell, going by my
| wardrobe, there isn't. It's always been one of the minor
| annoyances in my life - clothing and clothing-adjacent vendors
| put these icons on their products, and I have no first clue what
| they mean, because which family of signs is used seems to depend
| on some combination of country of origin, target market, and the
| position of Saturn relative to Jupiter.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Too bad there's no vaccination for iconitis.
| Tomte wrote:
| ISO 3758:2012
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Also ISO 7000 - Graphical symbols for use on equipment
|
| Example: do not iron.
|
| https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:grs:7000:3113
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Thanks!
| martyvis wrote:
| So the entry fee to work out how to wash my clothes is 113
| Swiss Francs (for the standard PDF)? Cheaper to buy new
| underwear every week
| Tomte wrote:
| If you're the type of guy who doesn't know how to use a
| screw unless he's read ISO 68-1, sure.
|
| The rest of us learn from our parents. Or books. Or even
| Wikipedia.
| ooOOoo wrote:
| The spec content (not from ISO): http://labritex.com/wp-
| content/uploads/ISO-3758-Care-symbols...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > Standard Textile Care Symbols? There is an actual standard
| for that?
|
| ISO 3758:2012, Textiles -- Care labelling code using symbols:
|
| * https://www.iso.org/standard/42918.html
|
| See also GB/T 8685, JIS L 0001:2014, ASTM D5489-96c, which are
| national versions that are basically the same as ISO:
|
| * PDF:
| https://www.intertek.com/uploadedFiles/Intertek/Divisions/Co...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_symbol
| zinekeller wrote:
| Where are you from? Serious question, since Europe do tend to
| have standard symbols for nearly everything due to cross-border
| (and cross-cultural) differences, while this is meh (why? we
| have English!) to North America.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Poland, EU.
|
| I remember doing some Internet searches for this over a
| decade ago, back when I started doing my own laundry :).
| Maybe I didn't look thoroughly enough - but between that
| search and the actual labels on the clothes I had, I saw no
| indication of a standard.
|
| Might be because my clothes were probably a mix of branded
| things sold on EU market, and (mostly) unbranded ones I
| bought on a bazaar, which could've been imported from Turkey
| or East Asia.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Makes sense since it was over a decade ago. US and Asian
| textile care symbols were a bad mess (differs from brand to
| brand) back then (while ISO sensibly implemented the then-
| EN standard because they were the same across brands).
| AnssiH wrote:
| I believe this regional symbols vs. text difference can also
| be seen in many washing machines - it is quite common to have
| symbols for the knobs and settings here (e.g.
| https://imgur.com/a/7yRzT), while I've understood that this
| isn't common in e.g. US.
|
| Though I thought textile care symbols are common in US as
| well, or at least I think all my US-bought clothes have them
| too. So this is probably not one of those US-Europe
| differences.
| [deleted]
| dmurray wrote:
| Having different displays for different markets is exactly what
| Unicode allows for: you specify the intended symbol, and then
| it's localised in the font you choose. An example from the
| proposal is "flat dry when wet, European variant has two bars,
| US and Canadian variant has three bars".
|
| A glyph in one font may look confusingly similar to a
| completely different glyph in another font (or the same font).
| If you don't have a digital version you then have to rely on
| context clues. You can quite reliably tell if a given C is
| LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C or CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ES, by
| assessing the surrounding text and the medium to see if the
| author was most likely writing for a Russian or an English
| audience.
|
| Of course, it's possible that manufacturers currently mix
| contexts confusingly. In that case, having each one draw from a
| single Unicode palette should help.
| leoedin wrote:
| Are fonts consistently localised? What happens if the pool of
| people who use a font (eg Arial) contain multiple washing
| symbol regions? Do you spin up a new, localised font for
| every country?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| No, you simply rely on your tooling, which should allow you
| to set the locale (or "script", which is the OpenType term
| for it) for your content.
|
| Thankfully, a lot of tooling designed to present text to a
| human (From Word to LaTeX to HTML) already have ways to do
| this, so folks writing textile documentation will now be
| able to take advantage of this, too.
| grishka wrote:
| This whole "is it Cyrillic or Latin" confusion sometimes does
| happen IRL. There's an insurance company that has its logo in
| all capitals: PECO. For most of my life I've always read it
| as Latin. But at some point I heard it in a TV commercial and
| they said it as "reso". Yikes.
|
| Also ROSNANO. It's not "pochaho", it's "rosnano".
|
| The reverse is also true: there's a "Bona Capona" restaurant
| but its logo uses a typeface that makes it tempting to read
| it as "Vopa Saropa".
| aasasd wrote:
| Well thankfully the rest of the world aren't subjected to
| the Cyrillic-Latin confusion, because it's only inside the
| country that Russian companies use the mix of Cyrillic and
| Latin... And specifically English, while a lot of people
| over twenty-five can't pronounce or read English.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I think I have three different sets of textile care symbols in
| my closet depending on whether the piece of clothing was
| ordered from the US, Europe or Japan. It's a handful.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not a bad idea, but there's dozens of other ISO symbols that I
| think should also be considered[0].
|
| Some are quite important; like safety symbols.
|
| One of my pet peeves has always been the difference between US
| emergency egress ("EXIT" signs), and everyone else in the world.
| In the US, they tend to be red, and the word "EXIT". Everyone
| else does green, with the man running through the door.
|
| In Japan, medical facilities were denoted by a green cross. In
| the US, it tends to be blue or red.
|
| Color can be an important factor, but that's tangential to the
| Unicode set.
|
| [0] https://www.iso.org/news/2013/10/Ref1787.html
| salmo wrote:
| The US takes English for granted so often, despite our actual
| diversity and no "official" language. Although I do love the
| National Park standardized symbols.
|
| But to totally wander down your tangent, color can be dangerous
| to rely on for accessibility reasons.
|
| Green in particular, seems like a poor color choice for
| accessibility, given the prominence of red/green
| colorblindness.
|
| I worked on an internal system with a Web UI once with someone
| much less sensitive to this than I was. He wasn't a jerk, just
| would do things and didn't like revisiting to change. I'm
| generally not a UI person and got tired of fussing about it, so
| just rolled with his "it's just internal" for his parts.
|
| One of the things he made would highlight rows of text by
| changing the color from grey to red without any other visual
| indicator (bold, etc.). The grey text already annoyed me, but
| that's a different story.
|
| Our very first user when we piloted just happened to be
| red/green colorblind and was completely confused. It didn't
| occur to him that color was the issue, and my coworker didn't
| understand why he couldn't differentiate. It dawned on me to
| tell him that the selections were red, and ask if he was
| colorblind. We walked through the rest of it with him and found
| another place where red and green text were used to indicate
| "good" and "bad".
|
| A week later, my coworker took colorblind-support as a
| 'requirement' and had reworked everything he did to ensure
| multiple visual cues. When he did decide to fix something, he
| was very thorough. And I'm sure he carried this forward to
| everything he's done since.
|
| I'm not an expert, but I think the red/green issue is the most
| common (especially for men), but I know there are other
| varieties, and other vision problems can make color difficult.
|
| I think that the figure running through the door is a great
| example of a good symbol, though. No reliance on language and
| an easily identifiable shape. But I'm definitely not an expert
| in either accessibility or design. I just try my best at both
| when I have to do that stuff.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I take accessibility _very_ seriously. A lot of the stuff I
| 've written has been fairly critical to people's lives.
|
| I use Sim-Daltonism[0] a lot. It's awesome.
|
| [0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I'm chuckling at the idea of a Japanese person trying to find
| medical care in San Francisco and walking into a weed
| dispensary by mistake
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| They use green crosses? (I live in NY, so I wouldn't know).
|
| Yeah, that could be interesting. I do know a lot of folks
| that think of weed/CBD as "Doc Stanley's Magic Elixir."
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In Colorado as well. I think it's become the de facto
| dispensary indicator in a lot of areas of the US.
| Agentlien wrote:
| I never knew about the color difference between European and
| American exit signs. I'm a color blind European.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Just to make things more fun, they sometimes use a green
| "EXIT."
|
| I suspect the OSHA (American safety standards org)
| requirement is a clear marking, and maybe a couple of
| choices.
|
| You can buy the signs at almost any kind of general store.
| seszett wrote:
| In Belgium at least the colour of crosses has a meaning: green
| for pharmacies, red for doctors and blue for veterinarians.
|
| In France I've only really seen the green one for pharmacies
| but maybe I didn't pay attention.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'll have to pay attention.
|
| Veterinarians don't seem to have any color code, that I know
| of. Many don't use crosses (they tend to have cutsey
| animals).
|
| The hospital near where I live has a blue cross at its
| emergency entrance, and a nearby urgent care clinic also has
| a blue cross, however, another nearby urgent care facility
| has a red cross.
|
| I don't know of any pharmacies that have any prominent cross
| displays. They tend to have their own branding (which may or
| may not have a cross integrated).
| seszett wrote:
| Interesting, as here (France and Belgium) only pharmacies
| consistently display a green cross. All of them do, and I
| wouldn't be surprised if that was a legal requirement. It's
| not as consistent for the other medical facilities, but I'm
| pretty sure that at the minimum they never use the "wrong"
| colour.
|
| I don't know where this usage comes from (and can't really
| look it up now) but now that I think of it "the Red Cross"
| is a doctors organisation, so it fits the scheme I told
| about.
| themulticaster wrote:
| I can add two more examples: Italian pharmacies (at least
| all that I've seen) use a green cross, while German
| pharmacies use a stylized A letter.
|
| Wikipedia has a couple of symbols if you're curious:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy#Symbols
| stuaxo wrote:
| Surprising these aren't already a part of unicode.
| xvilka wrote:
| For me it was always annoying that Unicode doesn't allow to code
| full set of subscripts/superscripts. It's so obvious and more
| necessary than many emojis they added recently.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Unicode subscripts and superscripts mainly exist because of
| IPA. They are not general ways to encode arbitrary
| sub/superscripts as it would require too many letters to be
| encoded.
| kevincox wrote:
| They could just add a subscript and superscript modifier.
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| Well that's actully what U+008B (PLD, Partial Line Down)
| and U+008C (PLU, Partial Line Up (though officially it's
| inexplicably Partial Line Backward)) were originally for:
|
| PLD text PLU would produce a subscript and PLU text PLD
| would produce a superscript.
| pdpi wrote:
| Superscripts are a typesetting concern, not an encoding
| concern.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| No they're not. Superscripts and subscripts in English as
| used in literature may be a typesetting concern but
| that's not their only purpose. Eg in chemical notations
| or in mathematical text it is not a matter of typesetting
| but an actual separate symbol with distinct semantics.
| kevincox wrote:
| If they change the semantic meaning of the text is that
| not under Unicode's purview?
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Italics change the semantic meaning of text too, but
| they're still rich text, not plaintext. Unicode has been
| generally taken the attitude that Unicode is for
| plaintext, not rich text, even if it's stretched the
| meaning of that a bit. (There's also the time they goofed
| up and added interlinear annotation, which is pretty
| clearly not plaintext, but they've since discouraged the
| use of that and I don't think they want to make any
| _more_ mistakes like that.)
| kevincox wrote:
| Unicode does have italic characters (at least for A-Z
| a-z) although they are labeled as math characters.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Sure, I could have chosen a more watertight example to
| demonstrate the point. (And I think that "although" is an
| important "although" -- those characters are _not_ meant
| to be used for ordinary italics; if you do this, you 're
| going to cause significant problems for anyone trying to
| process your text, such as by, say, searching it.) It
| doesn't have, I don't know, characters that are blue-
| colored bold italic underlined superscripts, you know?
| Whatever exceptions or seeming-exceptions Unicode may
| have made, they're not looking to make more of them.
| kevincox wrote:
| For sure. I think you are right. I'm just pointing out
| that the line here is much blurrier than Unicode probably
| wishes it was.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Oh, ha, yeah, no question there.
| neolog wrote:
| There is a proposal [1] that is looking for contributors.
|
| [1] https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal
| securingsincity wrote:
| I got interested with these symbols when my son was born and I
| was doing all of our laundry what seemed like all hours of the
| day. So it was a good opportunity to play with machine learning
| and vision edge by gcp. Ended up building a pair of apps for iOS
| and android that can identify the symbols
|
| https://jameshrisho.com/2020/10/making-laundry-less-terrible...
| tyingq wrote:
| Somewhat questions the value of these symbols versus text. Not
| disparaging the app, I'd need one to tell what they meant too.
| Tepix wrote:
| Text requires translation into thousands of languages.
| WalterBright wrote:
| No, it doesn't. Just type it into google. And each user
| only needs to do that once.
| tyingq wrote:
| As do cryptic and unreadable symbols.
| ewindal wrote:
| Not on every piece of clothing you sell.
| tyingq wrote:
| Current state, I would have to figure out what to type
| into google to see what some symbol like or ^ means in
| laundry terms. Either better symbols I don't have to
| google, or text in a language that I don't speak...but
| can figure out. The ones with temperatures don't even
| have a degree mark.
| securingsincity wrote:
| I would agree. The issue isn't that they are symbols, it
| is that the symbols are really hard to understand, other
| than hand wash where a hand is in a bucket of water the
| rest have little connection with the outside world.
| haileys wrote:
| It's strange that on a site like Hacker News people are
| so averse to learning new things. We seem to have no
| problem learning other kinds of symbol languages. These
| are standard symbols - you can search Google for "laundry
| symbols" to find a key
| tyingq wrote:
| It's not just the HN crowd. My non techie spouse isn't a
| fan either. It's also a meme. https://i.pinimg.com/474x/6
| 3/47/c3/6347c34b1ac9f34e3a27eb36d...
| aasasd wrote:
| HN folks complain all day that their computers and phones
| changed since the 90s.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The audience for the symbols are people who do laundry
| for a living.
|
| Symbols that you never use aren't very useful when all
| you really need to know is "do not dry", "do not bleach",
| "wash with like colors". It's really not that big of a
| deal to put a tag written in English and Spanish to the
| US, or in French to France, etc.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| My girlfriend works in the fashion industry in Taiwan.
| Designers in the US make an artistic drawing of a dress.
| She converts it to a Gerber file using CAD software. The
| Gerbers get sent to factories in China or Vietnam, who
| make prototypes and send those to Taiwan for testing.
| When approved, thousands are ordered and shipped directly
| from the factories to Macy's or JCPenny in the US.
|
| When artists use English, CAD designers use Traditional
| Chinese, and factory staff use Simplified Chinese or
| Vietnamese, and consumers use every language - there's a
| need for a standard symbol. You have a good point about
| dry cleaning services too!
|
| The difficult part is that the people through this
| international supply chain can't type these symbols in
| emails, or search for them in databases. That's why a
| Unicode code point should be assigned.
| bredren wrote:
| Would you please clarify how doing laundry constantly allowed
| time for ML research? Is it just because you had
| maternity/paternity, or was there something about the laundry
| workflow that let you squeeze in this activity?
| pas wrote:
| waiting for the laundry?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Very nice, my only comment would be that you can't go back from
| the individual pages to the main page by swiping left (iOS)
| milofeynman wrote:
| The ultimate -parent- hack is to only buy colored clothes (no
| whites... And if you happen to get any just wash them with the
| colored clothes anyway) non shrinkable clothes. Dry on low -
| "damp dry" so they don't all get fried. One load every 5+ days.
| The thicker clothes hang around the edge of the clothes basket
| (sweat pants in our case).
|
| Oh and I guess just by normal kid clothes (cotton/polyester) so
| they don't have special instructions.
| fanf2 wrote:
| We do that but how on earth do you manage with only one load
| every 5 days? We are a family of 4, one teenager, one under
| 10, and we're doing one or two loads of laundry every day.
| leetcrew wrote:
| pants can usually be reworn 2-3 times. occasionally a shirt
| can be reworn if it was only used for part of a day. this
| might require an unusually clean child. as a single adult,
| I do laundry on a two week cycle. and that's driven more by
| my inventory of season-appropriate clothing than the
| capacity of my washing machine.
| mb7733 wrote:
| 1-2 loads of laundry every day for 4 people? How small is
| your washing machine?
| fanf2 wrote:
| It's a Miele W5780 which has a 7kg capacity
| piceas wrote:
| In retrospect a 5.5kg front loader was a mistake for more
| than a couple of people in my experience.
| seventh-chord wrote:
| I've been doing that for my own clothes. White t-shirts turn
| pink, but pink is a good look too so I don't really care.
| Maybe that means I'm still a kid :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > a pair of apps for iOS and android that can identify the
| symbols
|
| Sounds like a failure of the point of those symbols. How about
| using words instead? Then you don't need an app to decode them.
| You can use google translate if you must.
| wwwhizz wrote:
| I ended up washing everything on 40 degrees and throwing
| everything in the dryer. Works just fine.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I noticed a huge difference in how long my clothing lasts
| once I switched to hang-drying most things. It's not that
| huge of a hassle and saves energy and I don't have to buy
| clothes as often. I started doing a lot more hang drying
| after I bought a bunch of merino wool base layers I use for
| skiing (which can't really be machine dried).
| zmix wrote:
| ...and should be washed as little as possible!
| hinkley wrote:
| If you look near the laundry baskets at any home or
| department store, you'll find comically large 'lingeree
| bags'. Turns out running anything with a fine weave through
| these - satin, rayon, exercise clothing, high TPI pillow
| cases - not only makes them last longer but also prevents
| pilling.
|
| Always button and zip your jeans, and if you're not in a
| hurry, cotton clothing seems to be less worn by friction in
| the dryer than by the high heat. I run a lot of my cotton
| knits through twice on permanent press instead of once on
| cotton. And I don't use dryer sheets. Dryer sheets keep
| your clothes from getting static cling _when you have over-
| dried them_ , but over-drying them damages them. The static
| cling is a symptom that you shouldn't ignore.
|
| What you want to do is pull your clothes out when there is
| just a hint of moisture in them. The air and the latent
| heat should be more than enough to suck out that last hint
| of dampness. And if one towel or pair of pants is still
| damp, nothing stops you from running them by themselves for
| a couple minutes while you fold the rest.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| I do this for cycling clothing. (Almost all synthetic, some
| wool, fair amount of spandex-y stuff.)
|
| This stuff lasts forever when washed on cool/warm and then
| hung.
|
| Friends of mine have complained about one brand or another
| not lasting very long, but they've been tossing the stuff
| in the drier.
|
| We're fortunate to have a basement with a nice beam I can
| place hangers on (for winter drying), or a hanging bar I
| fitted in the garage (for summer). Lately I've been getting
| rid of 8-10 year old stuff that I no longer like or no
| longer fits, and it's sellable, as opposed to just worn
| out.
|
| (Doesn't sell for much, but folks will happily pay $20 -
| $30 for special print cycling jerseys that are still in
| good shape and cost $80-130 new. Way better than tossing
| them in the trash.)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I assume you mean 40 C, not 40 F? I started washing
| everything on cold (my washer actually has a 'Tap Cold'
| setting - just tap water) and it works just as well. I
| encourage everyone to just try it once - it won't hurt
| anything and you can always re-run the load - and you will
| never go back. Also, you don't have to sort clothes.
|
| I read in some credible, non-technical publication, I think
| the NYT or WSJ, an interview with a engineer in that field
| (something like detergents or washing machines) who said that
| detergents used to need heat to enhance the chemical
| reaction, but that it's no longer true and cold water works
| just as well.
|
| EDIT: Does anyone know a good technical, authoritative
| resource on laundry? Consumer Reports has well-researched
| info, but not in the depth I'd like.
| aasasd wrote:
| I'm quite sure that plenty of bacteria don't die at 40deg,
| let alone 'tap cold'.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| From the Consumer Reports article cited below:
|
| > When a family member is sick, use hot water mixed with
| chlorine bleach to reduce bacteria in the bed linens and
| towels. The same goes for cleaning dirty cloth diapers,
| or other messes.
|
| But also,
|
| > Heating water accounts for about 90 percent of the
| energy needed to run a washer
|
| So I only use heat for special occasions.
|
| Article: https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-
| machines/dont-bother...
| astrange wrote:
| The washing machine isn't a heat sterilizer, the point of
| using hot water was just to activate the detergents.
| aasasd wrote:
| So when different clothes prescribe washing at different
| temperatures, it's because the 'activation' temperature
| of detergent changes depending on whether you use it with
| jeans or underwear?
| wahern wrote:
| Instructions haven't kept up w/ washing machines and
| detergents.
|
| > "Front-loaders and high-efficiency top-loaders run
| normal cycles 10 percent cooler than agitator washers,
| and the 'warm' wash temperature in the U.S. has declined
| by 15 degrees over the past 15 years," says Tracey Long,
| communications manager for P&G's fabric care products in
| North America. "Traditional detergent enzymes can be
| sluggish in cold water so we worked to create a mix of
| surfactants and enzymes that deliver cleaning performance
| in cold water across all product lines," says Long.
|
| > Consumer Reports' past tests found detergents have
| gotten much better at putting enzymes to work in removing
| dirt and stains at lower water temperatures, and are less
| effective at higher temperatures.
|
| Source: Consumer Reports, "Don't Bother Using Hot Water
| to Wash Your Laundry: Consumer Reports' experts say cold
| water can get the job done",
| https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-machines/dont-
| bother...
|
| If you want to sanitize anything, just use some bleach.
| It's harsh on fabric, but so is hot water, and the bleach
| will do a much better job. (FYI, I don't have any whites
| at all.)
| lgrebe wrote:
| As far as I know the clothes don't prescribe a
| temperature to be washed at, but rather a maximum
| temperature threshold upto which the material can
| withstand without risking damage to itself.
|
| So a 40degC cloth can be washed at any lower temp but
| might deform or loose color or even breakdown if washed
| warmer than that.
| patentatt wrote:
| Yup, I've never once in my life paid any attention to any of
| this, and I only ruined one sweater once. My wife was not
| happy, it was a brand new cashmere sweater from some brand
| name. Still though, if that's my only screw up and amortized
| over a lifetime of not caring about this, still positive ROI
| for me. Twist ending: we saved the severely shrunken fancy
| sweater and now it fits my kids, so not a total loss.
| dayre wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. They should simplify
| these to just TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL CASHMERE SWEATER and
| TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL EVERYTHING ELSE.
| m_eiman wrote:
| If you wash the sweater in conditioner and lukewarm water
| you can (carefully) pull it into its original shape.
| #lifehack
| m_eiman wrote:
| I probably mean "soak" or "handwash" rather than wash;
| I'm sure there's an instructional video somewhere on the
| net.
| toyg wrote:
| Ish. Dryers can literally melt heavily-synthetic clothes.
| Been there, done that.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Hey. If it melts it melts. Only survivors get to be worn.
| Aloha wrote:
| I generally avoid any synthetic that is not a cotton blend,
| I want to be able to was on hot and dry on bake.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Condescending tip - synthetics are for engine oils, not
| clothes ;)
| ambentzen wrote:
| For daily clothes, sure. For sports clothing, synthetics
| all the way. There is no worse pain in the world than
| sweaty chafing cotton.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Sounds like we need ultrasonic no-heat clothes dryers to be
| commercialised. The technology is there - just play music
| to the water molecules, and they dance!
|
| https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/no-heat-no-problem-
| ultr...
| sdeframond wrote:
| Or microwaves?
|
| (Better not leave anything metallic in there though...)
| bkor wrote:
| The article compares the energy savings over an already
| inefficient dryer. The article mentions that an existing
| dryer takes 50min (average). Such dryers are not what
| anyone should buy, they waste too much energy. Over time
| it's cheaper to buy a heat pump dryer. Those easily take
| 2.5 hours to dry. They're significantly cheaper over an
| e.g. 5-10 year period than buying a cheaper and way more
| inefficient dryer.
|
| The links to more detail with: > The goal of this project
| is to develop a clothes dryer prototype, using ultrasonic
| transducers, with an EF above 10 lb/kWh.
|
| But also: > DOE's Building Technologies Office is seeking
| new clothes dryer technologies that can increase the
| energy factor (EF) from 3.7 to 5.43 lb/kWh
|
| However, a quick Google shows that the 3.7 is not a heat
| pump dryer, see e.g.
| https://www.intechopen.com/books/current-drying-
| processes/th.... The figure for an existing dryer should
| be 7.6 lb/kWh. Meaning, the solution is (currently) not
| good enough.
|
| The link in the article and my link shows that the intend
| is to go way over 10 lb/kWh. The link I found showed it
| could be around 20 or even 44 lb/kWh (seems to depend on
| the frequency used). This while being way quicker than
| anything else, especially heat pump dryers.
| bluGill wrote:
| Turn the temperature down. You shouldn't dry anything that
| hot, it just wastes energy.
| anamexis wrote:
| I can certainly see other reasons to not run the dryer so
| hot, but why would it waste energy?
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| The hotter the coils the higher the amount of energy
| that's required to maintain it.
| anamexis wrote:
| Well yes, but also the faster it dries your clothes and
| shuts off.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Yes, but it's not a simple linear use of energy. For
| example, it might use 10x energy to dry twice as fast.
| That's a gain if you're in a hurry, but not so much if
| you're relaxing at home, on a tight budget, and/or have
| unusually high cost of electricity.
| anamexis wrote:
| It might, but does it actually? Or does it use 2.05x
| energy to dry twice as fast, making the energy use
| difference negligible?
|
| Edit: Consider also that the shorter you run the dryer
| for, the shorter you are running the (substantial) motor
| and fan, as well as less time spent heating the shell of
| the dryer and the air surrounding it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends, for most dryers the temperature is limited
| because water evaporation is taking all the energy. The
| motor takes the same energy per time, so twice as fast
| actually uses less energy. However there is a limit to
| this, eventually (the end of the cycle) you reach the
| point where water isn't evaporating fast enough to use up
| all the input energy and temperatures go up to heating
| clothing fibers to no useful purpose and this is
| wasteful.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Idk about the rest but the ratio of energy used by the
| heater compared to the motor is greater than 10:1.
|
| Edit: 20:1 mentioned here https://qr.ae/pGNTie
| anamexis wrote:
| If we assume for just a moment that the time to dry
| clothes scales linearly with heat applied, we can try to
| run some numbers: Total power usage for
| full heat is (5000W + 250W) * 0.5h = 2625 Wh
| Total power usage for half heat is (2500W + 250W) * 1h =
| 2750 Wh
|
| So that's a 4.6% increase in efficiency for using full
| heat over half heat.
|
| So the big question remains, does lower heat dry clothes
| more efficiently, and if so, how much?
|
| The Stack Overflow answer you linked raises some
| interesting points, but doesn't seem rigorous.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| From an industry pdf I stumbled across, it looked like
| moisture sensing improvements were the best bet to save
| the most energy. Though, I didn't see anything about
| comparing heat settings in that doc, which may be
| telling.
| bkor wrote:
| That's not true though. The additional energy to create
| that heat doesn't have to equal the time saved.
|
| You'll notice this in heat pump dryers. They cannot
| generate the same amount of heat. They take way longer to
| dry the clothes. But they're way more energy efficient
| than other forms of dryers.
|
| Edit: I thought of another example. Heating your home
| with hot water running through radiators. It's
| significantly more energy efficient to reduce the
| temperature of the water. This outweighs the additional
| time it takes to heat up your home. There are various
| drawbacks and considerations though, e.g. if the house
| has terrible insulation (noticeable draft) then it'll not
| be beneficial. There's various other things that'll
| significantly reduce energy usage, this while anyone
| would assume that generating heat is already very
| efficient.
| anamexis wrote:
| > The additional energy to create that heat doesn't have
| to equal the time saved.
|
| Right, it doesn't _have_ to, but it 's also possible that
| more heat makes it take proportionally less time (or
| close enough, with negligible decrease in efficiency).
|
| Obviously, yes, using a heat pump will use less energy
| than a resistive heating element. But the question is
| more about how much and how quickly heat is input
| (regardless of how it was generated) and how that affects
| drying times.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I'm not sure if heating with cooler water is more
| efficient.
|
| Some places you pay for the joules delivered into your
| home. You have flow meter and temperature meters on he
| input and the output of the radiators and the price for
| joule is constant regardless of input and output
| temperatures.
|
| What saves you money is keeping your interior cooler
| because heat loss is propotional to the temaperature
| difference.
| bluGill wrote:
| IF that is how you are billed it doesn't matter to you.
|
| Someone is paying to heat that water, and that someone
| would get a bit more efficiency out of the system if the
| water temperatures were lower.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Yes, but I think it's only because losses during transfer
| would be lower.
|
| If you generate energy inside your isolated house and
| transfer it to radiators also inside your house
| temperature shouldn't matter.
| bkor wrote:
| > I'm not sure if heating with cooler water is more
| efficient.
|
| Unfortunately I only have a Dutch link which goes into
| way more detail: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/lis
| t_messages/2027810.
|
| Dutch energy companies by law have to advise their
| customers how to save money. The app I use give exactly
| this advice (lower the temperature), plus various other
| advices.
|
| > Some places you pay for the joules delivered into your
| home
|
| That's something different than what I said, no? I'm
| talking about when you generate the heat in your home.
| I'm aware of that solution as well, they're efficient
| because of volume plus part of the heat (energy required)
| is waste-heat from some industry.
|
| There's still various ways to save energy despite exactly
| measuring the temperature out and in. E.g. radiator fans.
|
| I know this all seems entirely illogical. Energy in (or
| required) should stay the same. Practically though, it's
| probably energy losses that somehow occur and are
| avoided.
|
| E.g. for the radiator fans people measured if they save
| energy. They do, though the cost of buying them might
| outweigh the savings. DIY is cheap though.
| contravariant wrote:
| To some extent drying clothes _is_ generating heat
| (evaporation heat). If you 're clever about it you might
| be able to avoid heating the (wet) clothes and rest of
| the contents of the dryer (or the outside!) too much.
| However evaporating water requires an _incredible_ amount
| of energy, even if you just boil water away then most of
| the energy is still spent evaporating the water rather
| than heating the water, so it 's not really too clear-cut
| that running a dryer hot is massively inefficient.
|
| Edit: Also it's not that using lower-temperature water to
| convey heat is somehow more efficient, the thing with
| heat pumps is that they are more efficient at heating
| things to a lower temperature. If you're burning gas it
| doesn't really matter either way, you just get the energy
| out you put in.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| So would microwaves be the way to go?
|
| Edit: too much metal on clothing...
| bkor wrote:
| > so it's not really too clear-cut that running a dryer
| hot is massively inefficient.
|
| My heat pump dryer came with an energy estimate for
| various functions and loads. The various functions which
| shorten the time, or the functions which increase the
| heat (often related) are specified to use way more
| energy. To me, it's pretty clear, plus the manufacturer
| specifies it.
|
| > Also it's not that using lower-temperature water to
| convey heat is somehow more efficient. [..] If you're
| burning gas it doesn't really matter either way, you just
| get the energy out you put in.
|
| That's what I used to assume as well. It isn't accurate
| though. If the water that comes back to the heating
| element is too hot it'll not be as efficient as when the
| temperate is lower. Similarly, the additional energy
| that's needed to heat the water to e.g. 75+ degrees
| Celsius is wasteful. You can save around 30% of the
| energy by reducing the temperature of the water that's
| used to heat your home (though might not work due to
| various considerations). There are loads of other things
| that are possible which also significantly reduce the
| energy usage.
|
| Regarding how to save energy when using a boiler there's
| a huge Dutch topic about it with loads of tips: https://g
| athering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2027810. I
| assume similar information can be found in other
| languages, though heating using gas and water is really
| popular in NL (more so than any other country I assume).
| contravariant wrote:
| I wouldn't be too trusting of the claims of a
| manufacturer who's main selling point is the savings in
| energy...
|
| They might still be true though, but if you keep in mind
| that it takes about 5 times _more_ energy to evaporate
| water than to heat it to 100C, and that heating water is
| more difficult than most other substances it is really
| not clear _why_ using more heat would be (far) less
| efficient. Sure it would consume heat at a higher rate,
| but also less long.
| bluGill wrote:
| Because all you are doing is heating up clothing.
|
| Until near the end of the cycle your dryer is putting all
| the energy into evaporating water, so the temperature
| inside the dryer is actually fairly cool. Right at the
| end things change as the remaining water isn't enough to
| counteract all the energy being put in and so you heat
| the clothing to no purpose. So at the end off the cycle
| you should either shut off with a little moisture in the
| clothing, or regulate the temperature so that the heat
| input is balanced by the water evaporation.
| anamexis wrote:
| Wouldn't that be true for both high and low heat
| settings?
| bluGill wrote:
| Not really - the same energy is needed to evaporate
| water. The difference is mostly heating clothing which
| needs to get back to room temperature.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| My dryer seems to only have one setting, "hot af so be
| careful what you put in here."
| cryptonector wrote:
| That's a sign of a broken or stuck thermostat. You can
| replace it (or have it replaced). I lost a few shirts
| once because of that.
| securingsincity wrote:
| a cashmere sweater shrunk to a child's size will change your
| mind about that approach
| awwaiid wrote:
| Survival of the fittest! Hahaha
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, my approach is to limit my day-to-day clothes buying
| to just those washable in 40degC and machine dryable. Makes
| both the shopping and life overall so much easier.
| pc86 wrote:
| Yes, if you only buy things that you wash in 40 degree
| water and dry in a machine, you can just wash everything
| in 40 degree water and throw it in a machine.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Any women who still have to wear business attire
| interested in a similar approach should check out MM
| LaFleur. Well-designed, machine washable staple pieces at
| a (mostly) reasonable price. IIRC the company was founded
| by a young French woman who used to work in consulting
| and knows the pain of constantly needing to dry clean
| your clothes.
|
| https://mmlafleur.com/
| mikepurvis wrote:
| My rule of thumb is basically just to exclude from the
| dryer anything stretchy, slippery, knitted, or lacy. With
| that stuff hung to dry, what's left is all the plain cotton
| shirts and jeans that can take whatever you throw at them.
| bmicraft wrote:
| T-Shirts are almost always knitted. Do you propose never
| tumble drying t-shirts?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| By knits I'm referring to sweaters and the like, where
| the underlying material is wool or polyester.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Or you know, just hang everything out.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Well yes, we do that sometimes too. But the point of this
| thread was a no-fail process for quickly doing laundry.
| gardaani wrote:
| Underwear should be washed on 60 degrees to prevent any germs
| spreading.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Does the detergent not sterilize everything?
| scotty79 wrote:
| It doesn't. But drying in high temperature does.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It doesn't _sterilize_ , but it does bind to viruses and
| bacteria so they can be washed away. It's the reason why
| you don't need antibacterial hand soap: you don't need to
| kill, washing off is enough.
| shawnz wrote:
| I have seen mixed evidence about hot water being more
| effective than cold water when washing. Do you have a
| reputable source?
| ewindal wrote:
| Gotta wash on 60 sometimes too, though. Otherwise your
| t-shirts are going to become subtly smelly over time.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If you have dryer it nearly strilizes everything you just
| washed with hot air.
|
| I'm washing t-shirts in 40 deg and drying them in my
| washing machine with built-in dryer.
|
| They come out a bit damp to avoid creasing too much. I
| never had them smell even though I was just unloading dryer
| into a huge pile of damp clothes and leaving them like that
| for a day or two to dry out completely. I even forgot to
| take them out of the washing mashine and found out few days
| later. They were still damp but didn't smell. I washed and
| dried them again though to be on the safe side.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Very nice. Came here to see if someone had already made this.
|
| I wonder about helping manufacturers generate a QR code to use
| alongside the symbols to provide a detailed per-label
| translation?
| marton78 wrote:
| "This app is not available for any of your devices", days
| Google Play Store...
| fassssst wrote:
| Why don't laundry machines themselves use these symbols? How do I
| know what "hot" vs "warm" is in degrees?
| dale_glass wrote:
| There's some surprising absences in unicode.
|
| For instance, while messing around with setting up the i3/Sway
| bar, I couldn't find symbols for:
|
| * WiFi. Really. There's U+1F4F6, but it's not exactly the right
| thing.
|
| * Anything to indicate CPU usage, like some sort of
| microprocessor chip.
|
| * Anything to indicate RAM usage.
|
| This is curious because for instance U+1F50A and U+1F507 exist,
| so you'd expect to have a set of such generally useful icons.
| Plus, it's computer tech. The lack of computer related stuff is
| odd, given that there's no lack of many things I have no idea
| what they're good for, such as U+1F574 ("Man in business suit
| levitating")
|
| Edit: would be nice to have unicode support on here. Seems it
| gets stripped.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Another controversial absence is the "external link" symbol,
| which was rejected.
|
| https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06268-ext-link.pdf
|
| The reason seems to be that links are not a feature of a text
| document, they are part of a markup language, and therefore, it
| should be a feature of that language instead.
|
| For HN, AFAIK, they deliberately strip emoji, but most Unicode
| work fine. ("Si hahidoiXia Li desu" should show up correctly)
| akvadrako wrote:
| This has been rejected several times. I even submitted an
| updated proposal last year with I think pretty good
| reasoning. Yet all they said was:
|
| _> The context for usage is mark-up with links by default._
|
| Getting emojis accepted is much easier.
| marvindanig wrote:
| Someone needs to design an emoji that doubles as "external
| link" symbol!
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You are misunderstanding the reasoning behind symbol inclusion
| in Unicode.
|
| It's not about "what could be handy" but about what is needed
| to cover character encoding already in broad usage.
|
| Japan was early adopter of cellphone internet. One way to save
| data usage was to compose graphics as characters in a
| proprietary encoding (specific to the carrier!)
|
| Basically, in order to move Japanese handsets of custom
| encodings and onto Unicode compatible systems, Unicode needs to
| be able to display not just all the Japanese characters but
| also the weird graphics that carriers decided to come up with
| in order to decorate their online services. This is also why
| there is so much Japanese food characters.
| otras wrote:
| > It's not about "what could be handy" but about what is
| needed to cover character encoding already in broad usage.
|
| I'm pretty unfamiliar with Unicode, and this is interesting
| to read about. What's your take on something like Linear A
| being included?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A_(Unicode_block)
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I believe unicodes mission is to include all characters
| expressable in all writing systems "in the real world", and
| being a replacement for major text encoding is seen as part
| of accomplishing that mission.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Having obsolete scripts have codepoint assignments means
| that scholars can use Unicode for interchange. I think
| that's a win.
| tyingq wrote:
| It's hard for me to take this terribly seriously given poop
| emoji, phallic hieroglyphics, etc.
| wl wrote:
| > phallic hieroglyphics
|
| The alternative is to just not have Egyptian hieroglyphs in
| Unicode. The phallus is a frequently used symbol in Middle
| Egyptian. Then again, what's there is half-assed. There are
| no joining characters, so nothing displays right. And while
| you'll probably have the characters you need most of the
| time if you're dealing with Old Egyptian or Late Egyptian
| texts, Serapis help you if you're working with Ptolemaic-
| period texts.
|
| At least the situation is better than with cuneiform, where
| Unicode alone can't represent a text because the characters
| drastically vary over time and you need to make sure you're
| using the right font.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Scholars need codepoint assignments for obsolete scripts
| though.
| wl wrote:
| I agree.
|
| The fact, however, is that Unicode is not sufficient for
| scholars who use Egyptian hieroglyphs or cuneiform. For
| the former, most people seem to use JSesh. For the
| latter, line drawings + transliterations.
| sedatk wrote:
| I wonder if academical papers of today won't be taken
| seriously in the future because some of the symbols we use
| will have turned into a cultural faux pas? I hope not.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _It's not about "what could be handy" but about what is
| needed to cover character encoding already in broad usage._
|
| That ship has sailed years ago with new annual emoji
| additions...
|
| And even if that was the case, "what could be handy" would
| still be a good thing for the Unicode standard bearers to
| also have in mind...
| lxgr wrote:
| > what is needed to cover character encoding already in broad
| usage.
|
| That isn't true anymore though, is it? At least Emoji seem
| like a case where inclusion precedes use and noth the other
| way around.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Emoji existed since late 90s[1], just it was completely
| domestic to Japanese carrier intranets and gatekeeped hard
| that there aren't a lot of records remaining in the public
| Internet.
|
| Japanese feature phone market was weaponizing lack of emoji
| support in modern smartphones to chase them out, but iPhone
| happened anyway and Apple started incorporating their own
| fragmenting SoftBank-iPhone-specific implementation into
| iOS so Google pushed it all to Unicode to fix them all up.
| They wanted to capture user emails into Gmail, and all
| emojis sent from featurephones being replaced with = by
| gateways was problematic.
|
| 1: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apples-emoji-
| evolution-1997-2018...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Emoji existed since late 90s[1], just it was
| completely domestic to Japanese carrier intranets and
| gatekeeped hard that there aren 't a lot of records
| remaining in the public Internet._
|
| Emoji yes, the new emoji we get in annual Unicode
| updates, not...
| derefr wrote:
| The process for inclusion of most modern emoji is the
| exception, not the rule. That exceptional process isn't one
| you can get in on as an individual, either. It goes like
| this:
|
| 1. Some large-userbase OS+messaging services provider, like
| Apple or Microsoft, sends a "proposal" for some new
| codepoints to the Unicode Consortium. The explicit message
| is "do you think these are worth standardizing?" But the
| _implicit_ message is more unilateral: "we're giving you
| advance notice, that we're planning on including this emoji
| in _our_ fonts + supporting it in _our_ messengers, whether
| you like it or not, and whether it's inter-compatible with
| anyone else's systems or not. If you don't standardize it,
| we'll encode it using the Private-Use Area."
|
| 2. Given the Unicode Consortium's goal of never having
| proprietary text bits flying around the Internet -- and
| given these big service providers' histories of running
| messaging services (e.g. MSN Messenger) that _did_ use
| proprietary encodings for emoji, resulting in some lasting
| problems with digital archaeology -- the Unicode Consortium
| feel pressured by this "proposal" to standardize the
| proposed emoji codepoints, whether they really think
| they're "worth" being standardized or not.
|
| 3. The Consortium also then feel pressured to get a new
| standard revision out _quickly_ , to _get ahead of_ the
| planned usage by these service-providers (because that
| usage would have to be encoded _somehow_ , and if they
| don't give the service-provider a codepoint to use by the
| time they ship their new font version that includes the
| relevant emoji, they'll just have to make up their own.) In
| most cases, the Unicode Consortium is reactive to existing
| usage, allowing them to judge whether there _is_ real
| existing adoption of a symbol; but here, they have to be
| proactive, pushing out a standard that includes a codepoint
| _before_ knowing whether anyone will use it.
|
| As a result, you'll see these large dumps of new emoji
| where Apple/Microsoft/Google/etc. just decided
| autocratically that the world needed some more emoji, and
| Unicode begrudgingly followed along. It's like what
| happened when Unicode first absorbed the emoji codepoints
| of Japanese feature-phones; but happening just-in-time, one
| at a time. (If those Japanese feature-phone manufacturers
| kept introducing new emoji, they'd have had to absorb those
| just-in-time too.)
|
| There's a separate, much more sensible and deliberate
| process the Unicode Consortium goes through you're a
| regular-sized actor who's not attempting to strong-arm
| them, where you _do_ tend to have to prove existing use in
| either analogue documents, or as part of some proprietary
| digital text format.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| You have summarized the problem of the Unicode emoji
| process so well, but I want to say that it is not the
| one-directional pressure. Vendors do not want to
| implement too many new emojis, so the number of new
| emojis per year is essentially limited (50--100 [1]).
| Vendors also do not want that other vendors don't
| implement their new emojis, so they do cooperate with
| other vendors and obey the rules set by the Consortium
| (e.g. no trademarks). It's not comparable to individuals,
| but it is not exactly possible for vendors to put any
| emoji to the standard as well.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17206-emoji-and-
| vendors.pdf
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Yeah, I'm willing to concede that there are multiple
| reasons to include things in Unicode and some things are
| included for utility rather than because it exist.
|
| Things like half stars was added by petition similar to
| TFA, so my post should have been more nuanced.
|
| The point is that the reason why there is a seemingly
| useless emoji and not the [insert character you really
| want] is usually because one is preexisting and the other
| isn't.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Emoji is the sole exception to this rule and then you still
| need to convince the committee that separate WiFi, CPU or
| RAM emojis are needed to communicate the intent (say, for
| example, given there are other computer-related emojis). In
| fact I do think you can, given they were probably never
| suggested before [1] except for "wireless" which status is
| "Prioritization Pending".
|
| [1] https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| Emoji are for communicating to other people. I can't
| imagine why you would ever send someone a message with a
| ram stick in it. OP sounds like they want the icon for a
| task bar. In that case they can simply import any SVG
| they want.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Emoji are for communicating to other people_
|
| This is an important point that most technical people
| miss. They want to turn Unicode into a cross-platform
| FontAwesome. That's not what it's for.
|
| There are a lot of specific-use symbols in Unicode (chess
| pieces, for example), but those are legacy inclusions
| because many of those symbols were included in computers
| before the internet.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Chess pieces aren't included _just_ because of legacy
| computer software, chess pieces and many related symbols
| in Unicode come from "there are hundreds of years of
| books that use these symbols and encoding those books
| needs these symbols".
|
| I think that's also a distinction often missing in
| technical people's assumptions about Unicode and why it
| isn't just a cross-platform "FontAwesome" even just of
| legacy proto-FontAwesomes like Wingdings (which is also
| included and is its own different story). Unicode
| Consortium likes proposals to include things such as
| scanned documents of "here's how this 1850s book used
| chess symbols in the flow of text to communicate how the
| game is played". Not as adornments or images or separate
| figures, but directly as a part of the text.
|
| That was one of the things that the Power Symbol Proposal
| [1] that was heavily discussed on HN in the past (and
| sort of spun out of HN comments in the first place) wound
| up learning and realizing how big that was to Unicode
| Consortium's needs in a proposal. "How _was_ this used in
| real examples in the flow of text? " Finding and being
| able to cite and scan real world examples from text books
| and help documentation is an important part of the
| process. Even the chess pieces were about communicating
| to other people, in the flow of text in historic books
| and magazine articles and discussions.
|
| [1] https://unicodepowersymbol.com/
| lxgr wrote:
| > I can't imagine why you would ever send someone a
| message with a ram stick in it.
|
| Would you consider this to be a very different thing
| from, say, a MiniDisc? Yet there is an Emoji for that.
|
| Obviously we cannot include every picture possible in
| Unicode, but there certainly seems to be demand for a lot
| of them. Besides really enjoying their use in texting,
| I've also come across a lot of professional uses as well.
|
| Yes, this means that the Unicode Consortium probably has
| needed to adapt their original mission a bit, but I don't
| see the harm in that.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Would you consider this to be a very different thing
| from, say, a MiniDisc? Yet there is an Emoji for that._
|
| MiniDisc makes sense for two reasons. First, because it's
| a legacy inclusion. Second, because absolutely, you might
| use it in a text message. "Don't forget to bring over
| your bitchin collection of [MiniDisc] on Thursday!"
| cryptonector wrote:
| "Don't forget to pair your device with the classroom
| [bluetooth] attendance meter and to join the school
| [WiFi] to access school resources"
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Yeah the OP's arguments wouldn't work: the typical answer
| would be "use PUA and a custom font" as Powerline symbols
| do (incidentally, they _have been_ proposed to Unicode
| [1]). But as a general emoji CPU and RAM can be actually
| substantially different from any other existing emoji,
| which is the main concern of the Unicode emoji process.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19068r-powerline-
| syms.pdf
| [deleted]
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Has the Tengwar script been added to Unicode yet? For the
| longest time, that's been the biggest gap in Unicode that I
| knew of.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I believe Cirth and Tengwar are just less prioritized, unlike
| Klingon which was explicitly rejected (due to the non-usage
| of Klingon speakers at that time). Maybe it just needs a re-
| submission of the 1997 proposal by Michael Everson.
| raphlinus wrote:
| Klingon has a much more complicated history than this. The
| usage of Klingon is higher than many of the obscure things
| encoded in Unicode, so that's not the full reason. The real
| reason is most likely that Paramount considers the Klingon
| language its intellectual property and has attempted to
| enforce it[1]. Thus, I believe the official position of the
| Unicode consortium is that Klingon is written in Latin
| script but with a Klingon font (ie is basically a simple
| substitution cipher with a handful of ligatures), which
| satisfies everybody except for those who want Klingon
| included in Unicode.
|
| ETA: The proposal[2] has been revived recently, and in the
| committee meeting[3], they're clear that the blocker is
| legal.
|
| [1] https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2016/05/to-boldly-go-
| where-no-...
|
| [2]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20181-klingon.pdf
|
| [3]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20169-script-adhoc-
| rept.pdf
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Ah, thank you for pointers to the revived 2020 proposal
| (my radar to the L2 register was partially off at that
| time). I'm not sure that Klingon the script was in
| broader use at the time of the initial proposal though---
| there are several constructed scripts that enjoy uses
| comparable to Klingon's and I don't think they have been
| well received. Or alternatively, they all actually have a
| potential to be encoded but only Klingon speakers are
| enthusiastic enough to pursue.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Paramount could get more mindshare for ST if they allowed
| Klingon to be standardized in Unicode. Meh.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| If we could also get some network topology symbols that'd be
| nice too.
| paxys wrote:
| A ton of stuff in the Unicode standard exists for legacy
| reasons, and would never get approved today.
|
| The overall goal is to standardize symbols for communication,
| not building UIs. Everything you mentioned should be an SVG
| instead.
| mormegil wrote:
| I hit exactly the same issue (no wifi symbol in Unicode) when
| working on my hobby project of train timetables. Some trains
| offer on-board wifi and it is indicated in the timetable
| (along with other icons like bicycle transport available,
| accessibility, etc.). Sure, I can use SVG or custom icon
| font, but I am definitely doing "communication", not UI.
| notatoad wrote:
| i'm not well-versed in the politics of unicode, but it
| seems like you're looking for use-specific iconography, not
| symbols that are part of language. there's no standard
| symbol for "bicycle transport available", or "wifi access
| available". the three curved lines radiating from a circle
| image adds some visual flair to your project and can be
| used as a shorthand if you make it clear what it means, but
| any symbol you could use there doesn't necessarily convey
| the same meaning if i use it in my project.
|
| contrast that with the symbols in this proposal - the
| TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL WASHING TUB WITH SEVENTY DEGREES
| CELSIUS glyph means the same thing no matter where it's
| used.
| legulere wrote:
| It's not so surprising considering Unicode is about text, not
| about symbols.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Text _is_ symbols.
|
| And Unicode in particular has _loads_ of non-letter symbols
| in it. It 's only natural, given that a lot of these often
| show up in line with regular letters. Think of various paper
| documents you read, like instruction manuals, which make
| heavy use of non-letter glyphs in text.
| dale_glass wrote:
| There's plenty symbols in it. For instance:
|
| https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous.
| ..
| saint-loup wrote:
| There are various Unicode blocks dedicated to symbols. There
| are cartography symbols, domino tiles, alchemical symbols...
| There is even a block for "legacy computing".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block#List_of_blocks
| OskarS wrote:
| My of these is the block dedicated to western musical
| notation.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > such as U+1F574 ("Man in business suit levitating")
|
| It looks like this character made it into Unicode due to the
| fact that it was part of the Webdings typeface. Given how
| widespread that was, many of its characters made their way into
| Unicode.
|
| https://codepoints.net/U+1F574
|
| Now what it's _original intent_ was, I 'm not sure.
| fouc wrote:
| > According to Jen Sorenson ... the Man in Business Suit
| Levitating glyph in the Webdings font was intended to be an
| exclamation mark in the style of the rude boy logo found on
| records by The Specials published under the 2 Tone Records
| label. So perhaps the Unicode character would have been
| better named Rude Boy Exclamation Mark.
| etxm wrote:
| I always thought this was "hopping man at a ska show."
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Didn't know the G-Man
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Man_(Half-Life)) had his own
| emoji.
| lorenzfx wrote:
| See this article for an explanation:
| https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/06/secret-ska-history-
| man-b...
| donatj wrote:
| > This character was originally introduced into the Webdings
| font as an "exclamation mark in the style of the rude boy
| logo found on records by The Specials". This levitating man
| was known as Walt Jabsco.
|
| - https://emojipedia.org/person-in-suit-levitating/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| TIL: there's a Wiki for emoji trivia. I love it! Thank you
| to whoever bothers with collecting such information.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Emojipedia is not just an encyclopedia, it is a major
| contributor to the Unicode emoji process (its editor,
| Jeremy Burge, is the vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji
| Subcommittee).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Wow, I didn't realize that. Thanks! The way the website
| looks, I wouldn't have guessed it's a serious player.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _was originally introduced into the Webdings font as an
| "exclamation mark in the style of the rude boy logo found
| on records by The Specials "_
|
| Of course. What could be more useful or obvious?
| [deleted]
| joezydeco wrote:
| And Walt Jabsco was based on a young Peter Tosh!
|
| http://www.thespecials2.com/history2.php
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Unicode is amazing. It's grown from a character set to the
| default registry of language and symbols generally.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Can anyone make a proposal? Would be nice if we could add a
| general computing symbols category. Maybe one day we won't need
| icon fonts anymore.
| diydsp wrote:
| Embedded SVG :)
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Sure. Here's the story of how Alex Schmidt created the bison
| emoji:
|
| https://www.bisonemojipodcast.com/
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| For those who want to write a proposal, check out the Unicode
| Power Symbol project, who successfully got it added in 9.0.
|
| https://unicodepowersymbol.com/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689894
|
| I also discovered 11 Chinese characters for Hakka and
| Taiwanese, and wrote a proposal for getting those added. They
| were accepted, but are still waiting for the next batch of
| CJK Unified Ideographs to be released.
|
| https://medium.com/@peterburkimsher/hakka-news-
| adding-11-uni...
| sva_ wrote:
| I'm not sure if you found a solution to your problem, but in
| setting up i3/Polybar, I used the "Inconsolata Nerd Font" for
| such symbols.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I couldn't find symbols for:
|
| I can help with that:
|
| > WiFi
|
| "WiFi"
|
| > CPU
|
| "CPU"
|
| > RAM
|
| "RAM"
|
| Clear, unambiguous, in common usage.
| paxys wrote:
| Isn't it great that the English language and Latin script is
| universally understood?
| WalterBright wrote:
| What's the difference between: icon -
| explanation of the icon in your native language
| word - explanation of the word in your native language
|
| ? Consider that you can type the word into google and it'll
| define it for you.
|
| Do you have any evidence that laundry icons are more
| universally understood?
|
| Good luck finding any place in the world without plenty of
| signs in latin script, at the very least.
|
| Find someone in the world who can use a computer but
| doesn't know what the word WiFi is, but would recognize an
| icon for it he'd never seen before.
| TTT1 wrote:
| hey
| maelito wrote:
| Related : I've started to draw new emojis depicting the
| environment and energy subjects.
|
| As I don't think they would make it in the unicode standards
| soon, I've found the openmoji project very nice, it lets
| developers and designers use meanwhile.
|
| https://github.com/laem/openmoji-environment
| WalterBright wrote:
| The next generation of children will have to suffer through
| learning thousands of icons rather than 26 letters.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Fun fact: Unicode can not have 2^32 symbols, but 0x10FFFF
| (1,114,111) split across 17 "Code Planes" due, apparently, to the
| limitations of UTF-16.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Architecture_and_termi...
|
| https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible...
| caturopath wrote:
| Huh, for some reason I was sure they had these long ago. Like,
| snowman long ago.
|
| Incidentally, I know I'm probably a grownup since I now divide my
| laundry five ways:
|
| - Colors
|
| - Whites
|
| - Towel colors
|
| - Towel whites
|
| - Lint-free towels/rags
|
| I think this helps, but I don't know where you get real data.
| cyberlab wrote:
| There's more proposals here:
|
| https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/
|
| There's a rather whimsical one proposed called the Priest Emoji!
|
| https://github.com/Crissov/unicode-proposals/issues/425
|
| Instead of having proposals, why not just implement every
| thing/subject/object/symbol we can think of?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Because there can only be 17x2^16 - 2048 - 66 = 1,111,998
| unicode code points.
| https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/02/number-of-possible...
|
| Of course that limitation is artificial, due to compatibility
| with UTF-16 and UCS-2. So Microsoft would likely block such a
| proposal, since they'd have to change how Windows does
| character encoding.
| cletus wrote:
| It seems like the Unicode Symposium has engaged in a massive
| employment program for itself with a mission that will continue
| into perpetuity.
|
| Obviously ASCII was insufficient as it only really had Latin
| characters. Providing a standard interchange for the world's
| languages is a noble goal.
|
| But then (IMHO) Unicode went completely off the rails by trying
| to create a code point for every imagine symbol, including emoji.
| And now I guess textile care symbols.
|
| All the while, it's missing (at least as of 2015) key characters
| in living languages [1], engaged in the highly controversial Han
| Unification [2] (interestingly, there are Latin/Cyrilic and other
| duplicates that there is no attempt to "unify" [3]) and
| implemented Unicode code point modifiers.
|
| Emoji, in particular, seems to be a huge mistake (IMHO). Like...
| it's going to be constantly changing. What's wrong with
| hierarchical approaches that we've used for things like DNS?
| Create a Unicode code point for "emoji" and then the next code
| point is a completely different standard.
|
| The goal of creating a code point for everything just seems...
| wrong. We already have >1M code points. In 100 years at this rate
| we're going to have 1B+ code points where 99.99% of them are
| never used.
|
| Why can't we just solve the problem of expressing written
| languages and keep the rest to a different space?
|
| [1]: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-
| of...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#:~:text=Han%20....
|
| [3]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicod...
| astrange wrote:
| It is not true that every emoji is a single codepoint - for
| instance the flags are country code strings and there are many
| other cases. The original set were separate characters because
| they were imported from a different standard.
|
| Nobody really cares about Han unification either. It's fine,
| especially since you can use variation selectors or specify the
| text language to get appropriate fonts.
|
| Now I'm curious because Wikipedia mentions the Han group has
| "experts from North Korea"...
| andrepd wrote:
| I'd argue that textile care symbols are part of "written
| language", just as mathematical symbols or typographical marks
| for example, which exist in Unicode.
|
| Emoji... not so much
| jmole wrote:
| Agree with you 100% on textile care symbols.
|
| Emoji were certainly written language prior to unicode, but
| their expansion is unquestionably political since there is no
| well-defined "natural expression" of emoji that don't exist
| yet. It doesn't help that their standard [0] on what
| qualifies for inclusion and what doesn't is very poor,
| especially this: "Already representable. Can the concept be
| represented by another emoji or sequence, even if the image
| is not exactly the same?"
|
| Let's say I want an emoji for glass of water for example.
| There is already one for glass of milk: . Well, I could use
| or or maybe even by itself is good enough, so my proposal
| would not be accepted.
|
| 0 - https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html
| [deleted]
| yccs27 wrote:
| I guess this poses the question: Is there a clear boundary
| between text and icons? And in which cases should icons be
| handled like characters?
|
| Plain symbols within text clearly belong in a font. Logos, on the
| other hand, are images, not characters. Icon fonts, which are
| somewhere in between, became popular for webdesign but seem to be
| falling out of favor again. What is the current "best practice"
| here?
| willvarfar wrote:
| Things like laundry labels are an international language. They
| are understood (or not) irregardless of country and written
| language.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| To be clear laundry labels are _candidates_ to become an
| international language. They are currently not.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| There is no entity that can decree something an
| international language or otherwise, even if an entity were
| arrogant enough to claim that it could do so.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'll just add a meta comment that `understood (or not)
| irregardless` is the most value-ambiguous utterance I've read
| in a long while; quite clear to me what you meant, but
| probably would be quite a 'head scratcher' for an AI.
| kijin wrote:
| Many writing systems evolved from what we might consider icons.
| The letter A comes from the head of an ox, which becomes much
| more obvious if you put it upside down like [?]. Many Chinese
| characters retain a similarity to the objects they represent:
| "tree" is Mu and "fire" is Huo (imagine a bonfire). The
| Korean consonants g and n represent the general position and
| shape of your tongue when you make the "k" and "n" sounds,
| respectively. All of these symbols began their life as icons,
| but were later recognized as text as people converged on a
| certain usage.
| Archelaos wrote:
| No, there is no clear boundary between text and icons. What is
| included in Unicode and in what way is decided case by case.
| See for example the regional indicator symbols.[1] Always two
| of them indicate a particular country code according to ISO
| 3166-1.[2] They resolve into a sort of a logo: the flag of the
| country. (Guess what happens with rendering a legacy Unicode
| document, when a country changes its flag ...)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
| tremon wrote:
| This is more useful than some other recent additions, I'd say.
| It's somewhat surprising that this hasn't been included before,
| but maybe that's because this was standardized well before
| Unicode came to be.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| There was an attempt to add these to unicode in the mid 00s,
| and it failed for the same reason this will: GINETEX won't
| grant the trademark license, because then they'd no longer be
| able to ensure that whoever has the rights to use the symbols
| is using them correctly.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting, what other stand iconology is present in unicode ?
| general safety ? road safety ? chemistry ?
| grose wrote:
| How about alchemy?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_Symbols_(Unicode_bl...
| globular-toast wrote:
| Unicode is supposed to encode writing. These are not part of any
| writing system I'm aware of. If Unicode adds these, that steps
| over the line from being descriptive (ie. this is writing
| actually in use), to prescriptive (ie. these should be treated as
| writing).
|
| Maybe that boat already sailed with emojis, though.
|
| I think the main motivation for stuff like this is for people to
| feel good about having an impact on something like Unicode. I
| fail to see how this adds any value to Unicode.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Is it time to admit that simply storing everything as an image is
| the future?
|
| Sure, it isn't technically as neat, but it gives far more
| flexibility. It happens already in memes (where text is usually
| part of a gif)
|
| Text and text encoding dates back from the days when every byte
| of storage space mattered. Now lossless high resolution images
| are the norm, and wouldn't constrain what symbols could be
| included. If you want to make a word be slightly bendy for style,
| you can!
|
| Accessibility, relayout, etc. can all be done with images too -
| you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it
| however you please, and then puts it back as an image.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| - You can copy a text symbol and put it into a search engine to
| figure out what it means.
|
| - Screen readers can recognize text symbols without needing an
| alt text.
|
| - Text is more flexible on dark or light backgrounds and has
| better contrast.
|
| - Text is better suited for virtual keyboards and auto-correct
| or auto-replacement.
|
| - Text can be used in input fields.
|
| - Text has native rendering hints built-in, such as baseline
| and kerning, which improves inline rendering.
|
| - Text is more flexible when choosing a glyph. For example, you
| can render it larger for the visually impaired, or change fonts
| and put a special glyph into the font.
|
| - Text is more flexible when choosing color vs. black-and-white
| output. Try printing an emoji to see what I mean.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Tooling could be built to do all of that for images too.
|
| For example you could take part of an image and put it into a
| search engine too... That search engine would take images as
| input, and where the image represents writing if some kind,
| it would return relevant results.
|
| Screen readers could look into an image and read out any
| writing found, just like some screen readers can describe an
| image ("person in boat holding flag"). Deep nets that can do
| this reasonably well have been around years now.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Find my girlfriend a dress that doesn't need ironing.
|
| Easy if there's a "do not iron" symbol in text to search.
| Much harder to grep if it's an image.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| The tooling for doing all that with images is called a
| font.
| visarga wrote:
| You can do all that but you'd have to use a neural net
| instead of "find..." Neural nets make plenty of errors,
| including on OCR (at least 2-4%).
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| How would the software that lets me add text to images work?
| Presumably it would use unicode.
|
| And how would the software that extracts text from an image
| store the extracted text? If it comes accross a number of
| symbols from different domains how would it save them, and what
| table of contents would it use as a reference? Unicode.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But that's an implementation detail - some software might let
| you hand write text into an image with a brush or pen, and
| that might use as its internal representation the X,Y
| coordinates of the brush strokes.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| So then how will the software convert the X,Y coordinates
| into text that is read out to a screen reader? I think many
| of the other comments put it more eloquently than I can.
| yccs27 wrote:
| _you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it
| however you please, and then puts it back as an image._
|
| Then you still need some way to handle text, and image to text
| is not reliable. Text simply has so much more distilled
| information. Images are nice for humans, but I can't imagine
| them as a storage format for programs.
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| _you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it
| however you please, and then puts it back as an image._
|
| This is extremely non-simple. It is a strictly harder problem
| than just... encoding image+text in a sane container format
| like HTML or SVG.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But with various AI/ML approaches it's now becoming pretty
| straightforward. And lots of new hardware has ML
| acceleration.
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| So we train an ML model to convert images to text. How do
| we encode that text information?
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Hyper Textile Markup Language, of course.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| This is the most absurd thing I've heard this month. The page
| you are looking at right now _is_ in fact an image that your
| computer put on screen.
|
| However, that fact does not help you when you want to reply to
| my comment. Or more generally, if you want to edit, transform,
| store, compress, search.
|
| I can easily search 1GB of text on my computer for a specific
| pattern. I could not even _store_ all that information directly
| encoded as (say) raster or vector graphics.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Fonts are a standard and cross-platform way to bundle vector
| images.
|
| Now if we only had some way to figure out which image in the
| bundle corresponds to what... Maybe some encoding scheme where
| we assign a numeric ID to each image?
|
| (Oh wait...)
| superasn wrote:
| Little related but saw a nice documentary(1) called "Have you
| ever heard of the "Emoji Commission"? | DW Documentary" where a
| lady became a passive member by buying a $20K ticket or something
| to get a dumpling emoji added (IIRC it was sometime ago).
|
| If you have time to kill, it's super interesting on how they
| decide which emojis to add.
|
| (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr9L27V337E
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I always wondered what those weird symbols on my clothes were
| for. And why everything shrank, wrinkled, or changed colour.
| Techasura wrote:
| Absolutely support this for many reasons.
| tarsinge wrote:
| In the meantime, still no external link symbol.
| quelsolaar wrote:
| Unicode is a secret moat for the large tech companies. The more
| crap they add, the harder it is for anyone who starts fresh to
| catch up. For every new emoticon, that teenagers expect to have,
| the chance they have more platform choices diminishes. Standards
| like these should not exist, unless the standard body also
| provides a free conformant reference implementation.
| centimeter wrote:
| It's also a way for large tech companies to unilaterally
| exercise neurotic political projects, like replacing the emoji
| for "pistol" with a squirt gun. Apple or Google can do whatever
| they want to Emoji in violation of the Unicode standard and
| other vendors are more or less forced to follow suit.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Unicode is a vast standard and have many separate parts.
| Unicode the character set is a significant but miniscule part
| of it. You don't need much to support Unicode if you don't do
| display (or delegate the display to someone else, like web
| browsers). The conformance requirements are also loosely worded
| that you can declare many parts of them as unsupported and move
| on [1].
|
| Unicode also packages an essential but (in hindsight) complex
| concept and process like "what is the word boundary" or "what
| are characters usable as a part of identifiers" into a neat
| algorithm and data table. The algorithm is more complex than
| the data, which is readily available for you. Assigning a new
| character to Unicode mostly means a change to that data, not to
| the algorithm. If you consider one should be able to display
| every assigned character as expected to be fully conforming to
| Unicode---I stress it's not true, but if we assume so---then
| there would be no conforming implementation of Unicode at all.
| All Unicode implementations just implement what they need to
| support.
|
| [1] For example, the requirement C12 (https://www.unicode.org/v
| ersions/Unicode13.0.0/ch03.pdf#page...) specifies that you need
| to implement the Unicode Bidirectional algorithm only if you
| support right-to-left characters. In the other words you don't
| have to implement the Bidi algorithm for conformance.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| "should not exist" is pretty strong. Unicode is a great
| improvement over what came before.
| centimeter wrote:
| Is your life really improved by having access to <tilted
| heart face>?
|
| Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We've completely eliminated
| most of the advantages it might have held in the first place,
| like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset
| into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters
| composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use
| cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled
| this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. "Zero width
| joiners" should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total
| nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious
| vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5
| diacritic-induced crashes).
|
| It's fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it
| should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters
| (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like
| <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously
| be handled by a generalized vector graphics format.
|
| Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips
| emoji from the post text!
| fastball wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. I use Unicode in my startup - what
| exactly do I need to catch up on?
| quelsolaar wrote:
| (Not knowing your startup ill make loads of assumptions here,
| sorry if I get it wrong)
|
| If you are drawing Unicode characters that include a full
| range of Emoticons, you are most likely using a platform API
| provided by Apple/Google/Microsoft or similar. You, like most
| developers, most likely live in "Big-tech land", so you get
| this for "free".
|
| If you want to port your application to an open source
| platform or a new upstart platform, where this isn't
| available, they may not have the resources to draw thousands
| of Emoticons, so its harder for them to attract you as a
| developer.
|
| Lets say someone is writing a SMS app for something like a
| PinePhone. SMS is open enough protocol that this is possible.
| The UI for a chat app is something you can build in fairly
| short order. There are plenty of open fonts, you can use, but
| there are no open fonts that have thousands of detailed and
| sometimes animated Emoticons. Without Emoticons very few
| people are going to want to use a PinePhone as their main
| communications device. The amount of effort needed to
| implement a SMS chat vs a SMS chat + draw all emoticons
| people use is massive.
|
| Unicode, and SMS are both open, but given the size of the
| Unicode Spec, its effectively shutting out any small player
| form implementing it. Big tech gets to claim they use open
| standards, but at the same time make sure no one can threaten
| them.
|
| Its a bit like when Microsoft tried to make a standard for
| documents so complicated that only word could implement it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If you want to port your application to an open source
| platform or a new upstart platform, where this isn't
| available, they may not have the resources to draw
| thousands of Emoticons, so its harder for them to attract
| you as a developer.
|
| License a commercial font or use Twitter's CC-BY font:
| https://twemoji.twitter.com/
|
| > Unicode, and SMS are both open, but given the size of the
| Unicode Spec, its effectively shutting out any small player
| form implementing it.
|
| You only need to implement the Unicode spec if you want
| your own emoji designs.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| You seems unaware of why emoji got accepted to Unicode in
| the first place. Emoji was originated from Japan's three
| big telcos, which had different sets _and_ encodings of
| emojis (e.g. some used Shift_JIS extension, some used
| embedded images via HTML, some used SI /SO sequences). It
| was already impossible to write a SMS app without
| accounting for this peculiarity. Unicode thus made this
| situation much easier, not harder.
| fastball wrote:
| Are there not any open-source fonts that support the full
| Unicode spec?
|
| You only need to implement glyphs people are actually
| using. If people are using [some glyphs] from the Unicode
| spec in your app, yes of course you need to use a font that
| implements them. How else could it possibly work? What
| would your alternative be?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Here's a test: how many of those icons can you correctly identify
| without reading the accompanying explanation?
|
| I.e. use words instead. Words work just fine. Words can be looked
| up in a dictionary (or just type them into google).
|
| Good luck googling a scribble.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I don't think this will work because it is my understanding that
| these symbols are copyrighted and require a fee for use in
| garments.
|
| https://www.ginetex.net/userfiles/files/Textile_care_symbols...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| At least in the USA: Symbols can't be copyrighted, only their
| encoding (eg the svg or otf) may be. Visual styles and their
| likeness may not be copyrighted.
|
| Symbols may be trademarked but that is specifically for logos
| and is a different concern (eg fair use rules differ, intention
| is to avoid confusion not preserve IP, etc).
|
| (You can make an exact riff off any font but if you code it
| from scratch it is ok.)
| hannasanarion wrote:
| They are not copyrighted, they are trademarked by a nonprofit
| called GINETEX that licenses them freely, but with agreements
| that mandate their correct use.
|
| They are not likely to want to give an open license to the
| public via unicode that might result in incorrect labeling.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Yes, that's a main reason why Korea and Japan (used to) have
| their own laundry symbols (KS K 0021 and JIS L 0217
| respectively). Japan recently switched to ISO 3758 to match
| with China, which had switched from its own symbol much earlier
| though.
| myspy wrote:
| So if there is an ISO 3758 norm, does that mean the symbols
| there are copyrighted by Ginetex? The symbols almost look the
| same as far as I can see.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| They are identical (AFAIK). Being a standard doesn't mean
| its original copyrights or licensing requiements have been
| waived.
| bloak wrote:
| Interesting...
|
| The document you linked to says they are "protected under
| trademark law", not copyright.
|
| I would guess they are "certification marks", which are a bit
| different from a normal trade mark like "Apple" or whatever.
|
| Their web site says: "GINETEX IS AN INDEPENDENT NON-PROFIT
| ASSOCIATION UNDER FRENCH LAW". So I would hope the fees are not
| exorbitant. But who knows? It's an independent organisation. If
| it did turn evil, would the French government intervene?
| myspy wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that. Crazy that it's in the hand of
| one entity.
| simias wrote:
| I always thought that unicode opened pandora's box with emojis.
| It makes sense to represent those that already existed in
| previous encodings for compatibility (it is meant to be
| _universal_ , after all), but beyond that it's just a minefield
| IMO. In particular a big annoyance with emojis is that their
| representation varies a lot from device to device or even from
| application to application. You can expect that a B or a F will
| be recognizable in any non-windings font, but many emojis look
| different enough to the point of changing pretty drastically
| their semantics.
|
| I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow
| unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text
| format. Some kind of restricted SVG-like dialect that would be
| handled correctly by all unicode parsers and look the same
| everywhere.
|
| This way anybody could design their own application specific
| icons and emojis, you could either allow free-form emojis or only
| whitelist site-approved variants. Think something like
| fontawesome, but it'd work anywhere you can put unicode text.
|
| Sure, it would significantly increase the size of the text but is
| it usually a big problem? It would compress very well, and in my
| experience text storage is pretty negligible these days in most
| applications compared to images and videos.
|
| Instead it seems that we need to allocate codepoints and ask
| people to create fonts for textile care symbols, and national
| dishes, and all sorts of sports, and...
| toto444 wrote:
| I have a site that makes heavy use of Emojis and to have the
| same rendering on every device I use the Twemoji (A simple
| library that provides standard Unicode emoji support across all
| platforms) made by Twitter.
|
| https://github.com/twitter/twemoji
|
| Without this maintaining compatibility with all platforms is a
| nightmare.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow
| unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the
| text format.
|
| Unicode folks are also feeling this pain and there have been
| multiple attempts to decouple the emoji business from Unicode:
| the closest to what you've described is the Coded Hashes of
| Arbitrary Images [1]. (The proposed encoding is wasteful but of
| course would have been improved if it were accepted.)
| Considering that the Unicode consortium is a consortium of
| _vendors_ , this emoji business is suboptimal even for vendors.
| But there seems no particularly good way to efficiently and
| securely implement such mechanisms.
|
| [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-
| hash.p...
| bdowling wrote:
| Interesting. Apparently TR-52 allows for arbitrarily long
| strings of tag values for emoji variants. So the standard
| could, theoretically anyway, allow an emoji variant that
| includes an entire PNG or SVG.
| [deleted]
| thecopy wrote:
| What problem is this solving?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Printing of textile care labels ... that are on all of your
| garments, towels and bedclothes.
| steerablesafe wrote:
| I wonder how they did it before.
| practice9 wrote:
| By using custom fonts?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Using different fonts.
|
| A font is just[0] a table that maps numbers to pictures. A
| typical font will map a number 65 to a picture of what we
| know as letter 'A' in Latin alphabet. But there's nothing
| preventing you from making a font that will contain, at
| index 65, a picture of a dog. Or a "hand washing" symbol.
| And this is what people did - both to support non-English
| alphabets in the era where "printable character" meant "7
| bits", and to support mixing graphics with text (if you add
| that missing bit to make a full byte, you get 128 more
| codes to play with).
|
| Ultimately, screens and printers don't understand letters -
| they understand arrays of color values (or, occasionally,
| colors attached to parameters of a curve). Fonts are the
| intermediary, and you can draw anything with text if you
| supply the right font. The problem is though, if you had a
| custom mapping of characters to pictures, you had to ship
| it with your text, and make sure users know how to
| configure their software to use your specific font for your
| text.
|
| Unicode exists to allow every number describing a character
| to have a fixed, standardized meaning, so that you can send
| text around independently of the fonts. Instead of fighting
| for the same 256 codes, there are now over a million
| possible codes, and fonts declare which code ranges they
| know how to draw. As a result, you don't have to worry
| about mixing alphabets and graphics in text anymore - worst
| that can happen is that something will get rendered as a
| placeholder. But it won't get rendered as a wrong symbol.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Well, strongly simplifying. In reality, the "picture"
| can be anything from a bitmap, a set of bitmaps, a vector
| image, or executable code; the mapping part can also be
| executable code. A prime example of "code is data" :).
| Simple devices like thermal printers might accept only a
| trivial byte-to-bitmap mapping (aka. "bitmap fonts"). More
| complex ones will work with modern fonts, which are
| essentially programs that interpret text and produce
| instructions to draw it. Pushed to extreme, you get things
| like a videogame inside a font[1], or a font that
| automatically translates startup marketing copy into plain
| English[2].
|
| [1] - https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
|
| [2] - https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/
| Ensorceled wrote:
| In a complicated manner.
|
| Really, why is this a problem for people on HN?
|
| I'm hoping it's not what I think it is.
| kstenerud wrote:
| I wonder how they did mathematical symbols before.
|
| I wonder how they did arrows before.
|
| I wonder how they did musical symbols before.
|
| I wonder how they did typesetting markers before.
|
| I wonder how they did braille before.
| tremon wrote:
| It's on the linked page:
|
| _Wash Care Symbols M54
|
| The font Wash Care Symbols M54 has already implemented
| textile care symbols. However, they are encoded in the C0
| Controls and Basic Latin block._
| rakoo wrote:
| What problem is alchemical symbols(https://unicode-
| table.com/en/blocks/alchemical-symbols/) solving ? Not every
| character is solving an issue, but they represent something
| that exists today and is already a standard icon.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm not sure about all the sections, but this section:
|
| > Symbols for salt, vitriol
|
| would be useful for sure on HN!
| yorwba wrote:
| Alchemical symbols are used for digitizing alchemical
| treatises, like this one:
| https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/mss/norm/ALCH00001/
| [deleted]
| yarcob wrote:
| Make it easier for web shops to show care labels for the
| products they sell?
| martyvis wrote:
| Unless you can be sure the client has the typeface to render
| the unicode symbol, you need to supply the font, so you might
| as well just send the needed PNG or SVG.
| deskamess wrote:
| Glad that the language is something I cannot read. It was fun
| trying to interpret the icons and coming to a realization that
| either I or the images are too obtuse.
|
| What does an extra line added to an already existing icon mean?
| eMSF wrote:
| The underlines mean gentle (and very gentle) as explained in
| the table at the top (see TEXTILE CARE SYMBOL COMBINING BAR
| BELOW etc.)
| deskamess wrote:
| Ah... thanks!
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| Same here. I intuitively understand some of them, others I know
| because I had to look up to before, but otherwise I also
| consider most of them obtuse.
|
| I guess the main point is that they're already standardized.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I wonder what the purpose is of adding more and more symbols to a
| standard that was originally intended to represent texts in
| written languages. It almost feels like it is the easy part of
| 'improving' the standard: Adding more symbols, while at the same
| time there are still many problems with missing characters for
| existing character sets.
| https://www.w3.org/International/articles/missing-char-glyph...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The document was last updated in 2003. Nowadays Unicode
| provides a solution to the gaiji problem: the Ideographic
| Variation Database [1]. For unencoded Han characters using
| Ideographic Description Sequences as ligatures is now quite
| viable.
|
| [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/
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