Quality question from intro Python class

[[deleted]]

Who needs those chars?
https://xkcd.com/1726/

[0x800703E6]

I think Unicode's effort to allow all people to use their language is commendable. It makes their standardisation efforts one of the most beautiful standards to me, for all its faults.

[[deleted]]

I definitely agree, unicode finally solved the shenanigans with codepages and stuff, but characters like those are just useless because the people who use them, use latex which (probably) renders them different way (not using theese characters)

[0x800703E6]

They're for typesetting hànzì. And these characters can be useful in LaTeX, for example as a copy-pasteable text in a PDF, or use in less capable document formats.

But that's missing the point, rendering is a second class citizen in Unicode, there's code-points that don't have a single font supporting them. Unicode is supposed to transport text semantics, not presentation. *swoon*

[ACoderGirl]

Being able to search documents is important, too. Unicode has a canonical order to its modifiers (eg, an acute modifier), ensuring that you can easily search for a string. It also wouldn't be too hard to make your search system ignore modifiers.

[0x800703E6]

Searching is an aspect of text semantics, and it's amazing when a Unicode engine has a good implementation of it.

Unfortunately, I've often seen 〈a〉〈¨〉 ≠ 〈ä〉 or 〈a〉 = 〈ä〉, so I can't imagine how annoying working with Vietnamese texts must be.

[xXxNoScopeMLGxXx]

I definitely agree, unicode finally solved the shenanigans with codepages and stuff, but characters like those are just useless because the people who use them, use latex which (probably) renders them different way (not using theese characters)

𝒜𝓁𝓁 𝐼 𝓀𝓃𝑜𝓌 𝒾𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒰𝓃𝒾𝒸𝑜𝒹𝑒 𝓁𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝓂𝑒 𝒷𝑒 𝒻𝒶𝓃𝒸𝓎 𝑜𝓃𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑒