[HN Gopher] Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear
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       Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear
        
       Author : soopurman
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2021-06-16 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (andysalerno.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (andysalerno.com)
        
       | amarshall wrote:
       | Relatedly, I've always rather enjoyed the talk "Love Hotels &
       | Unicode"[1]
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20120404020043/http://www.reignd...
        
       | littlestymaar wrote:
       | Only tangentially related, but it's a question that have bothered
       | me for a while: Is there a reason why composite Math symbol
       | aren't part of Unicode? Things like series, limits or integrals
       | look like a really good fit for this kind of composition, and you
       | could get rid of mathjax for 80% of its usage.
        
         | 1-more wrote:
         | I gotta think it's because all the math you mention cannot
         | render within a normal line height. That's not the end of the
         | world for rendering, but maybe that counts as a bridge too far
         | in Unicode? Or maybe it just boils down to "because it doesn't
         | yet" and as soon as someone makes a good proposal it'll happen
        
         | duskwuff wrote:
         | 1) Combining emoji compose into a finite and reasonably small
         | set of combined symbols. The set of mathematical formulas isn't
         | finite in the same kind of way.
         | 
         | 2) Layout of mathematical formulas is reasonably complicated.
         | It doesn't make sense to force that complexity to be included
         | in every text layout engine.
        
         | neolog wrote:
         | There is a proposal by the Julia language team
         | 
         | https://github.com/stevengj/subsuper-proposal
        
         | initplus wrote:
         | I guess the question is how much typesetting do you want to
         | stick into unicode? It works OK for emoji because the resutls
         | are always simple: it's just another individual emoji, with the
         | same size & characteristics as the original.
         | 
         | That said unicode is not free from typesetting weirdness, see
         | the character [?].
        
       | tialaramex wrote:
       | This is definitely an example where "character" was the wrong
       | word. We start out OK with bytes being distinct, but by the end
       | we're talking about how a character is made out of several
       | characters. If we think in terms of code points (Rust's native
       | char type actually provides here a slightly different thing, a
       | Unicode Scalar Value, which certain types of code point are not,
       | but close enough) clearly a code point isn't made out of several
       | code points, so we needed a different word.
       | 
       | I like squiggle, if you're a text rendering engine you might want
       | to use "glyph" although you might already need that word for
       | something else. But try to avoid character because that word
       | already has far too many meanings, most of which won't be what
       | you wanted.
        
       | dukeofdoom wrote:
       | Emojis need more serious attention. A lot of online conflicts
       | start from miscommunication due to lack of facial expressions. To
       | the point thats its driving a social crisis and division in the
       | real world.
        
       | adamrezich wrote:
       | truly hate how much additional complexity this emoji bullshit has
       | added to unicode
        
       | pkulak wrote:
       | I'm on Linux right now and, sadly, couldn't see the magic
       | character properly. :(
       | 
       | Anyone know if I'm missing anything, or is there no support for
       | 13.1 yet? My standard routine is to just install every noto font
       | I can find (noto-fonts noto-fonts-cjk noto-fonts-emoji noto-
       | fonts-extra).
        
         | littlestymaar wrote:
         | Works here on a fresh (yesterday) Linux Mint install.
        
           | merlinscholz wrote:
           | Same on fresh, stock openSUSE Tumbleweed with Gnome 40
        
         | xwx wrote:
         | It works for me with Firefox on NixOS using Noto Color Emoji,
         | from, I'm assuming, noto-fonts-emoji.
        
       | pgn674 wrote:
       | If you want to see how an emoji will render on various platforms,
       | or generally search what's available, Emojipedia is good for
       | that: https://emojipedia.org/kiss-woman-woman-medium-dark-skin-
       | ton...
        
       | asciimike wrote:
       | This reminds me of a blog post that I can no longer remember that
       | discusses how Chinese is a lot of arranging several related kanji
       | into a single character to express a new idea (please link it if
       | you can find it).
       | 
       | I would love to see unicode characters to allow for arbitrary
       | combinations beyond those defined using just ZWJ to allow more
       | flexibility (e.g. blizzard could be created by adding like
       | "slowflake x 5" which creates a single character with five
       | snowflakes, without having to create an entirely new character
       | representing blizzard from snowflake + ZWJ + snowflake).
       | 
       | As an aside, my favorite ZWJ magic is black flag + ZWJ + skull
       | and crossbones = pirate flag.
       | 
       | Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols for more
       | symbol language fun.
        
         | Kronopath wrote:
         | I think you mean this article on "Yingzi":
         | http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
        
         | alisonatwork wrote:
         | The notion that Chinese characters describe ideas that are
         | formed from smaller characters that also describe ideas is a
         | nice story, but it's not really the case for the majority of
         | Chinese characters. See the Wikipedia page, Principles of
         | formation section[0].
         | 
         | Many Chinese characters are constructed with two parts of
         | smaller characters, one of which can indicate a general concept
         | while the other provides a vague pronunciation hint. This isn't
         | really good enough to provide you with enough information to
         | guess at either the meaning or the pronunciation if you don't
         | already know the word, but if you do already know the word from
         | spoken language, then the hints might be enough to recognize
         | the character when you read it too.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_...
        
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