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.
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...
In case someone still finds this thread: standards my ass. Guess what, in Poland we have different ISO 3758:2012 symbols. Compare [0] with [1]. As it turns out, some of the symbols have "A" and "B" variant, and we use the "B" one for some reason.
Also I couldn't figure out WTF is "drip drying", and how "drip line drying" and "drip flat drying" differ from "line drying" and "flat drying". The Internet is very unhelpful here - every single article I saw assumed you already know what it means. Fortunately, [1] contained a note that the methods of drying are defined in ISO 6330:2000, and as luck would have it, I saw a copy of ISO 6330:2000 fall out of the back of a truck. Taking a quick peek, I now know that "drip line/flat drying" means...
...just "line/flat drying", except you set your washing machine to not do the final spinning cycle.
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- [0] - EN ISO 3758:2012 :: http://labritex.com/wp-content/uploads/ISO-3758-Care-symbols...
- [1] - PN-EN ISO 3758:2012 :: https://www.eurowolle.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/piktogra...
The standard is there. If people decide not to use it that's on them. Just because the US decides not to use the SI units, that says less about the metric system and more about the US.
Most countries in the EU (AFAICT) do use the ISO standard.
The fact that one country does not use it is not an argument that that standard is not a standard.
My point was slightly different. Poland does use the standard, the same standard. It just so happens that the standard has "B" variants for several icons.
I guess it's sort of an improvement that I only need to know 1.5 sets of icons instead of 3-5 different ones.
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.
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.
Also РОСНАНО. 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".
> It can be written in Serbian Cyrillic or Gaj's Latin alphabet, whose thirty letters mutually map one-to-one, and the orthography is highly phonemic in all standards.
Though digraphs spoil the clarity somewhat.
Which reminded me that I should check what Kazakhstan is doing to its language. They seem to at least have avoided the eldritch monstrosity of Polish with ‘Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz’ and the like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U). But they are still setting themselves up for English-language people pretending they can pronounce anything Latin-looking—despite English itself demanding you memorize the dictionary twice, for speaking and writing. So Kazakhstan will soon have its own great writer Karel Kaypek.
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.
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.
The rest of us learn from our parents. Or books. Or even Wikipedia.
Example: do not iron.