Possible to dot your Is with hearts? | Hacker News Reader

Possible to dot your Is with hearts?

tex.stackexchange.com

88 pointsjjgreen10 comments

Heart-dotted i and j should be added to Unicode.

Medieval monks used to do this with the first letter of the word for "eye" (oko), and those got added, despite the fact that one of them had only one historical occurence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_o_variants

Monks having a laugh by making the Os in the word for eye look like eyes, and now we have unicode support for that, amazing.

Quoting from Wikipedia, "серафими многоꙮчитїй" (serafimi mnogoočitii, "many-eyed seraphim")

Biblically accurate cyrillic O character.

Ꙩ, Ꚙ, Ꙭ and ꙮ are definitely underutilized as emojis...

I'm finding it kind of hard to take the Unicode approval process serious though, when we have to use complicated multi-codepoint escape sequences to produce a simple country flag because character codes are supposedly a limited resource now and can't be assigned nilly-willy - yet an inside joke some medieval monk made like 600 years ago positively HAS to be encoded as its own character...

Those variants do have semantic differences from normal glyphs at least for some manuscripts (because it was only used for eye-related words), and were even reproduced in more modern literatures. Heart-dotted i and j are, at least for now, just stylistic variations. You can probably propose a variation selector for them, however.

Electrical engineers and mathematicians can get along after all, they just needed some love.

The quest to bring empathy to quaternions still remains an elusive problem to be solved in a future paper should funding continue.

This is the most curious I think I've ever been about latex. Maybe I do have a use case for it after all!

I would love have this in my messaging apps.

I will be implementing this for my DnD group - I need to record the main story so far, and a serious-looking document with hearts in the i's would perfectly fit our wizard.

Clearly Unicode needs to add this as a combining diacritic

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