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Comment by tambre | Hacker News Reader

Once people stop needing and/or inventing new characters and scripts.

"214 graphic characters that provide compatibility with various home computers from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s and with early teletext broadcasting standards"

This part is dear to me, as I helped craft it. It includes 2x3 videotext mosaic characters that will make it much easier to draw large text have have better quality charts in text terminal interfaces.

And, of course, the ability to properly encode documents that were generated in computers in the 70's and 80's that contained those platform-specific characters.

For 14 we are planning on adding symbols from the Sharp MZ series and the large text characters (3x3 cells) of HP terminals.

The niche audience of terminal based games will also be thankful forever to you and the rest of the people that got those characters into Unicode.

Go get them. https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1FB00.pdf

Down for me as is everything else.

Found a unicode consortium tweet (!) with a picture of the whole block:

https://twitter.com/unicode/status/1085613123183071232?lang=...

They might be interested in Unscii, too. It has been updated in light of Unicode 13.

* http://pelulamu.net/unscii/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18478350)

Do these... do these include the old Commodore 64 metacharacters/symbols??

You can read the explanation in the proposal, which will tell you everything, at http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf .

Yes. PETSCII (and ATASCII) were some of the first characters that were added to the proposal (before I arrived at the group)

And emojis, don't forget about the all-important emojis.

You are probably joking, but I am seriously annoyed there's no donkey emoji.

My wife and I call each other "donkey", and some years ago we used the horse emoji, which was low resolution enough to look as a donkey if you squinted. But modern emojis are too high resolution and it definitely looks like a horse now. So I feel your pain.

Is U+130D8 not good enough for you?

If there's room in Unicode to describe "ARABIC LETTER BEH WITH THREE DOTS POINTING UPWARDS BELOW AND TWO DOTS ABOVE" there's room for "DONKEY".

I wonder why Gardiner's descriptions never made it into Unicode? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs#E

O, wait, there are censored genitalia in D block ...

Thanks, I wasn't aware of it. Sadly I get square when I try to use it so less reliable than emoji.

I wanted a pink pony.

My wifi SSID is <horse U+1F40E><unicorn U+1F984>, which is a barely satisfactory approximation.

(FWIW the FTP site is still up: ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ )

Emoji: It's like Kanji, only without agreed upon semantic meaning or pronunciation. I pity historians of the future who have to try and decipher this garbage.

either that or when there are 2^24 used codepoints.

The available space is closer to 2^20 (0-10FFFF, minus surrogate pairs, depending on whether you are talking about Unicode scalar values or code points).

There’s also Emoji modifiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols_and_Pict...) and regional indicators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol that complicate determining the number of Unicode characters.

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