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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

More Unicode mission creep. What's next, 4 characters that form 90 degree line segments, so you can write a circle? If you want images, use gifs. Grump grump grump.

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This is a hillarious complaint because ◯, ◜, ◝, ◞, ◟, ◠, and ◡ has been around since Unicode 1.1 of 1993.

Just shoot me now. I demand that you shoot me now.

Is it Walter season then?

Upvote for the grump thing, but really, Unicode is about scripts, and scripts are evolving. If we want to write sparklines, we get to with pen and paper, but then... we can't transliterate them into Unicode? That makes no sense. No, characters for sparklines make a lot of sense, more than for emojis, but when you consider that CJK characters are basically monochrome stylized emojis, modern emojis make sense too.

My biggest gripe here is that we will need to kill UTF-16 so we can have a larger set of codepoints, and that's only a gripe because killing UTF-16 is going to be really difficult, not because I want to keep UTF-16 (oh no, UTF-16 really needs to die).

That's uh. I dunno how to tell ya this Walter.

Coming your way in Unicode 16.0...

Allow me to introduce: BOTTOM LEFT JUSTIFIED UPPER RIGHT QUARTER BLACK CIRCLE!

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-16.0/U160-1FB00.p...

But wait! There's more! U+1CC31, UPPER CENTRE LEFT TWELFTH CIRCLE! And you best believe there's 11 more.

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-16.0/U160-1CC00.p...

I personally like getting more terminal-oriented ideographical symbols in the Unicode; what I don't like is yet another font variation for the basic Latin alphabet. Oh well.

I think there comes a point we should just embrace sixels so you can draw whatever it is you want to be shown in a character cell. That point is usually somewhere around here where it's "sure, I can copy it as normal text data but is it actually going to look like anything like it's supposed in a normal font anyways?". Even Windows is getting support for sixels now.

gag me with a spoon

Hey Walter, characters are images. ;)

I know you're joking, but the alphabet shapes actually started out as pictograms. The "A" is an upside down ram's head.

I mean, I wasn't really joking - because yes, pictograms are images too. Isn't it the case that pretty much every device we see, is an image? I'm being 'smart-ass' about it, but I do think there is some use case where, eventually, its all just pictures, all the way down ..

I, for one, would love to see a UI that is composed entirely of typographic symbology, even to the point that it would function beyond the normal UI paradigms. I'm a huge fan of things like FF Chartwell, where the font contains super rich, detailed information that is not just a 'letter' or 'character' .. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365761 if you don't know what FF Chartwell is yet, maybe you'll enjoy it, maybe not ..

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