[HN Gopher] Fleuron (typography)
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Fleuron (typography)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-10-07 12:33 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| y04nn wrote:
| In LaTeX you have the pgfornament package [1] that allow you to
| do nice things.
|
| [1](pdf):
| https://ctan.math.illinois.edu/macros/latex/contrib/tkz/pgfo...
| swayvil wrote:
| Clearly we need a kisrhombille-tessellation based fleuron
| building system.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Is it just me who doesn't like fleurons? For me, they are in an
| awkward limbo between abstract symbology and realistic
| illustrations, and draw an unreasonable amount of attention to
| themselves compared to other forms of decoration.
|
| Generally, I would prefer that whitespace alone be used to
| separate paragraphs, and more significant sections be demarcated
| by headings, which can be embellished less intrusively by use of
| a decorative typeface, underlining or colour.
| benj111 wrote:
| They mention using it as a punctuation mark, but surely it must
| be distinct from other punctuation marks to deserve its own
| unicode point, further they must differ from each other to
| deserve their own unicode points.
|
| Surely this deserves to be on the font rendering side, not the
| unicode side?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The term "fleuron" describes something more like the term
| "emoji" than it does a particular punctution mark. Yes,
| fleurons are often used for ending sentences. But they function
| more as a decoration that happens to go there than as a period
| or question mark.
|
| Sure, I can imagine a single emoji in all of unicode, just pick
| a different font for whatever particular one you want to use.
| But much easier and more logical to have a wide variety of them
| available to you that roughly matches your current font.
| jahewson wrote:
| Looks like quite a few of these arrived with the addition of
| the historical Manichaean script in which "there are several
| punctuation-marks to indicate headlines, page-divisions,
| sentence-divisions, and others".
| bazoom42 wrote:
| They probably "deserve" to have unicode code points because
| they existed in pre-unicode character sets.
| derefr wrote:
| I've seen fleurons used in blog posts as _end of article_ mark.
| It 's sort of a generic sign-off / chop, stuck inline to the
| last paragraph of the text. Usually, when used this way,
| they'll be styled in a different, lighter color than the text
| before them.
|
| Obviously, an "end of article" marker isn't a thing that needs
| to exist -- you know the article is over because there's no
| more article! But people putting extra "stuff" inline at the
| end of the last paragraph of an article, has a long history in
| printing anyway. Because people can be extra, and I suppose
| Unicode should support encoding the extravagancies of existing
| historical documents.
| benj111 wrote:
| Ok, an end of article marker is fine.
|
| But it doesn't mean we need multiple code points meaning the
| same thing.
|
| An a is an a regardless of whether it serif or sans, whether
| it has the thing on the top like a floppy d (edit: the
| unfortunate comparison wasn't intentional).
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| It's not always obvious the article is over these days.
| Sometimes they run sneaky ads afterwards.
| joe__f wrote:
| So it's basically a flower emoji?
| perihelions wrote:
| Maybe Unicode should add a new code block for these fleurons.
| They'd all be combining-characters, and you would build
| effectively a mini-DSL for describing fleurons as geometric
| compositions of radicals.
| california-og wrote:
| Any complex combination or arrangement of fleurons or other
| type ornament is not really possible with any contemporary word
| processor for one good reason: type is not set by hand anymore.
| Precise but free placement of glyphs is tedious if not
| impossible. It would require a whole new paradigm of setting
| type, one that would be based on modularity and strict
| typographic measurement system. A digital letterpress system if
| you will. The closest we've had that digitally was probably
| textmode and ASCII art.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I ADORE this idea.
|
| I wonder how far one could take it with just ligatures?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Font shapers would definitely have one of the moments of all
| time with this one.
| lopis wrote:
| > I wonder how far one could take it with just ligatures?
|
| Very, very far...
|
| https://blog.erk.dev/posts/anifont/
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF2sn2DXjlA
| derefr wrote:
| So like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Charac...
| , but instead of describing the compositions, they actually
| perform them?
| graypegg wrote:
| Oh wow that's interesting. Would be interesting if it
| actually performed the change, and on any character. Pointing
| emojis in the right direction with the Horizontal Reflection
| modifier would probably be useful!
| perihelions wrote:
| Unicode doesn't perform it, but I understand it's
| straightforward to typeset it in, for example, TeX/MetaPost:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36809624 ( _"
| Typesetting Rare Chinese Characters in LATEX"_)
| crazygringo wrote:
| That would totally break the basic conceptions of line height
| and font size though. The fleuron in the top image is probably
| five lines tall.
|
| Arranging fleurons is great, but that seems it should belong to
| the realm of word processing layout or drawing program
| arrangement, not something at the Unicode/font level.
|
| Complex fleurons aren't graphemes; they're illustration.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| It's pretty much on the Unicode level. Its goal is to support
| world's writing systems - current, extinct, and even
| fictional.
|
| _> Complex fleurons aren 't graphemes; they're
| illustration._
|
| The line between writing systems and illustrations is pretty
| blurred, if you look closely enough. Especially now, with
| composable and even AI-generated emoji. (I wonder if they
| regret including emoji now...)
| bsza wrote:
| > That would totally break the basic conceptions of line
| height and font size though
|
| So do [combining characters], yet they're valid Unicode.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't zalgo on HN. It makes the thread less readable
| and thus the discussion less interesting.
|
| Edit: I've scrubbed it out of your comment and put the
| formerly zalgoed text in [square brackets].
| greenyoda wrote:
| For those not familiar with the term "zalgo":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text
| crazygringo wrote:
| No they don't. That hasn't changed the line height at all.
|
| And obviously those combinations don't exist in any actual
| writing system. It's a (funny) abuse of the Unicode design,
| not the intention of the design.
| perihelions wrote:
| That vertical-stacking combining pattern is similar to
| how Tibetan script actually works (on a smaller scale):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script?useskin=vect
| or#...
| bsza wrote:
| You did write "break the basic conceptions of", not
| "change". To me, a line overlapping with _the previous
| two lines_ seems to do exactly that.
|
| Also, the original suggestion was for Unicode to add
| ornamental combining characters. I don't see how that
| would require any breaking change. You can already stack
| them vertically and horizontally.
| doubloon wrote:
| only the first three render properly in firefox / linux
| yorwba wrote:
| Only the first three are covered by at least one of the fonts
| on your system. If you want the rest to render, install more
| fonts.
|
| My Firefox on my Linux uses DejaVu Sans for the first three,
| Noto Sans Palmyrene for the next two, Noto Sans Manichaean for
| the one after that and Noto Sans Symbols 2 for the rest.
|
| Most popular Linux distros have one or two packages bundling
| all Noto fonts.
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