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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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.

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So like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Charac... , but instead of describing the compositions, they actually perform them?

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!

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")

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.

> That would totally break the basic conceptions of line height and font size though

So do [combining characters], yet they're valid Unicode.

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.

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.

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=vector#...

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].

For those not familiar with the term "zalgo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

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...)

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.

I ADORE this idea.

I wonder how far one could take it with just ligatures?

Font shapers would definitely have one of the moments of all time with this one.

> 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

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