Writing the Prince symbol in Unicode (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Writing the Prince symbol in Unicode (2013)

parkerhiggins.net

69 pointsmmastrac17 comments

> Apparently (at least according to Wikipedia) Warner Bros had to send out floppy disks with a custom font to the music press they hoped would review his record.

This was actually the reason he changed it--to troll Warner Bros. over an ongoing contract dispute. Apparently US law requires publishers to credit artists under whatever name they choose to use, and this right cannot legally be signed away; his name change forced WB to propagate that font everywhere, in promotions, legal documents, everything.

It'd be amusing if fonts started adding ligatures that supported turning that sequence into the price symbol.

Alternatively, and for bonus points make "the artist formerly known as prince" a ligature for the symbol

> It’s not perfect, and it isn’t very simple to type, but it beats writing out The Artist Formerly Known As Prince each time.

I'm assuming the author is not being serious? Because you need to make sure the reader has access to that font, and otherwise ensure some sort of degradation, which is a lot more work than just typing TAFKAP.

You don't need a special font installed. It works fine in Chrome on OS X without anything extra installed.

Just what http://shapecatcher.com/ put out in a few minutes seems to render more reliable as a compromise than the proposed composition Ƭ̵̬̊.

Ŧ̊ (Latin capital letter t with stroke + combining ring above) or Ankh, ቶ (Ethiopic syllable to) or even simply the female sign with caret?*

All seem way safer to render than this. With more than one Combining Diacritical Mark Ŧ̬ͦ it's seems quite impossible to tell how this will be rendered in different browsers.

* why does HN filter for the female sign 0x2640 and Ankh?

> *(why does HN filter for the female sign?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156894

HN needs to provide some kind of exception for discussions specifically about Unicode--which may contain examples.

It even displays correctly in Notepad in Windows 7.

Looks like this on Chrome Ubuntu. I'm not impressed

http://imgur.com/KlHdZ47

Looks about the same on Android Chrome.

Firefox on windows 7 is slightly worse.

Looks completely broken — This is on Chrome (46.0.2490.80), Mac OS X (10.10.5): http://imgur.com/bC1n1sA

I thought the same thing. "But does it really?"

Plus, Prince has resumed using his given name, so there is no need for the symbol or the who "artist formerly known as" thing.

I prefer to refer to him as "The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince". Or TAFKATAFKSP, if you want to shorten it a bit.

Why, the ``Bruce'' font? Because someone jokingly suggested that because it was way too cumbersome to say, ``that symbol guy'' or whatever, it'd be much easier to give the symbol a name, and that name should be ``Bruce.'' So there.

http://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html

Slightly off topic, but the Charlie Murphy/Prince skit on The Chappelle show was epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGqUwr9j8Zc

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