18 votes

A spectre is haunting Unicode

3 comments

  1. unknown user
    Link
    Fascinating. This is the sort of content I get disappointed by when I reach the end of the article—which happened all too quickly here. Would love to read more about this.

    Fascinating. This is the sort of content I get disappointed by when I reach the end of the article—which happened all too quickly here. Would love to read more about this.

    5 votes
  2. Crespyl
    Link
    That's a really cool bit of history. I've done a lot of reading over the years on the development of ASCII and Unicode, and western encodings in general, but there's a lot of fascinating details...

    That's a really cool bit of history. I've done a lot of reading over the years on the development of ASCII and Unicode, and western encodings in general, but there's a lot of fascinating details about how eastern countries have adapted to the information age that are easy to miss out on.

    It's really interesting to read up on things like the input systems for their more complex scripts, or the looming Y2K-esque issue of Emporer/Era based date systems being hard coded to assume a certain era (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnste/2018/04/12/the-japanese-calendars-y2k-moment/).

    I thought the link to A Book From The Sky was cool too. I make a kind of idle pastime out of doodling things that look, as much as possible, like they ought to be letters or carry some meaning, but are of course totally nonsense; It was fascinating to see a similar idea taken to such lengths.

    1 vote
  3. [2]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. pseudolobster
      Link Parent
      The examples they use are unicode characters. 妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁 are all ghost characters. The fact they're probably rendering in your browser right now attests to their inclusion in unicode. As for the...

      The examples they use are unicode characters. 妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁 are all ghost characters. The fact they're probably rendering in your browser right now attests to their inclusion in unicode.

      As for the psi character, it looks like they end every article with it. Not sure why.

      6 votes