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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly that means Twitter text is no longer fully portable. If you copy some text from Twitter, you specifically need Chirp to render it properly or else characters like their special logo character will be broken for all other fonts 

Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...

Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm feeling like this is an intentional decision in order to push other fonts/foundries to start adding the Twitter logo as a standard Unicode character. Basically bypassing the need for consensus by just forcing the matter and cementing their logo in typography standards.

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This seems a little paranoid, yes. :) What text do you envision copying from Twitter that's going to specifically include their special logo character? It's not going to be in anybody's tweet text.

> Because they're using the "Private Use Area" of the font improperly...

Uh, isn't putting your own characters in Unicode's private use area specifically what that area is for? Isn't that where fonts that have dingbats unique to them, for instance, would put them?

Not likely perhaps, but could this be one way to retain more copyright over tweets in the future?

Most companies based on user generated content try to claim ownership over it by way of agreements. That has always been murky legal territory and it's not easy to know what value they have.

If the proper rendering of content was made dependent on proprietary fonts, that could be one way to exercise control over where that content can be used.

It's not impossible that making users pick proprietary emoticons could have economic value. Remember where you heard it first...

Have you ever seen nerd fonts? This is not a new idea at all:

* https://www.nerdfonts.com/

* https://fontawesome.com/

I don't think this will push fonts/foundaries to add the twitter logo any more than I feel pushed to use the twitter logo in handwriting. Fonts are very nice in that the user still enjoys a high level of choice in the matter. Heck, even the twitter nonsense could be fixed with a stylus/tampermoney script of one or two lines.

So, the same as literally every other font that uses PUA (which is the majority of icon fonts).

To complement srfvtgb's point, even official unicode characters are not guaranteed to be included in all fonts. Having the glyph disappear on other platforms will probably be accepted as a fact of life, especially as it's a corporate logo.

Apple has been doing this for a while and it hasn't had much effect outside devices which run their software: 

Not a lawyer, but if the Unicode Consortium even tried to add their logo to the specification, wouldn't Twitter have to actively sue to stop them or risk having their trademark genericized?

Gut check: are there currently any trademarked symbols in Unicode? I can't think of any offhand, and it I find it difficult to imagine it happening for precisely that reason.

The well-known laundry symbols are trademarked apparently, and while there is a proposal to include them into Unicode, this might in fact be blocking it…

These are trademarked for other reasons than a company logo though, and I don't really see the point in including company logos (which might change or disappear tomorrow if they go bankrupt or are taken over by another company—and then what with the company logo in Unicode?).

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