Unicode

[Zero999]

Meantime, it is with great pleasure that I can now say things like: ± 5µV/√Hz at 300°K …

...and then you will get pedants pointing out that it is not proper to use the degree symbol with Kelvin, so it should just be: ± 5µV/√Hz at 300 K

It was a pain having to put ^0.5 rather than √. The degree symbol was possible by using lower case o with a subscipt, but it didn't look as quite good as the real thing: see if you can spt the difference: 360^o vs 360°?

[helius]

± and ° were already supported as they are part of Latin-1 or whatever codepage smf defaults to.
Also, any serious engineering formulas already required MathJax.

[Zero999]

± and ° were already supported as they are part of Latin-1 or whatever codepage smf defaults to.

I didn't know that. I suppose that was another problem: it wasn't obvious to most people what characters were supported and what weren't. One couldn't be sure whether they would get the true character or just a question mark.

[Macbeth]

Was the solution much different to my old sugestion?

Lets try an Ω while I'm here 

[Ampera]

What does good ole google translate say about this? it translates to :
Uith this niu server cluster that gnif moved the forums over to, the forum nou seems to have Unikode support. To test, I am sending this message to fonetikallj in sjrilliks, half bekauze and consider it to be kool, and half bekauze and uas too lazj in Russian class to learn anjthing else. I imagine native Russian (or similar) speakers, this looks reallue ueird.

Уитх тхис ниу сервер клустер тхат гниф мовед тхе форумс овер то, тхе форум ноу сеемс то хаве Уникоде суппорт. То тест, И ам тйпинг тхис мессаге фонетикаллй ин сйрилликс, халф бекаузе и консидер ит то бе коол, анд халф бекаузе и уас тоо лазй ин Руссиан класс то леарн анйтхинг елсе. И имагине то нативе Руссиан (ор симилар) спеакерс, тхис лоокс реаллй уеирд.

Google Translate is only of partial help here, because I'm not speaking another language. It's English using the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Google Translate is just using a phonetic transliteration, and because of my need to get creative with the alphabet, with it not having sounds like þ and ƿ, it comes out looking strange.

To speakers of a Cyrillic-using language like Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian (there are differences, so it is probably not completely legible to many) it's, or at least I hope it is, a funny play on the languages.

[Cerebus]

± and ° were already supported as they are part of Latin-1 or whatever codepage smf defaults to.

I didn't know that. I suppose that was another problem: it wasn't obvious to most people what characters were supported and what weren't. One couldn't be sure whether they would get the true character or just a question mark.

A few weeks back I tried to solve that problem for myself. I tried all the possibly useful characters that where a meta-key away on my keyboard and checked what posted and came back with the same encoding.

The characters I tried were: π∏µΩ∂∆√–≠≈∑∫°˚±…
And the ones that survived the round trip were: µ°±–…

[BrianHG]

Let us just hope that the advent of full UTF-8 support on the forum (Thanks Gnif!) doesn't cause an outbreak of even more incomprehensible garbage produced by the crowd whose proper punctuation to smiley ratio is the same as the tooth to tattoo ratio of some fiddle-playing horror movie hillbilly.

Meantime, it is with great pleasure that I can now say things like: ± 5µV/√Hz at 300°K …

That was possible a year ago...

[wraper]

Let us just hope that the advent of full UTF-8 support on the forum (Thanks Gnif!) doesn't cause an outbreak of even more incomprehensible garbage produced by the crowd whose proper punctuation to smiley ratio is the same as the tooth to tattoo ratio of some fiddle-playing horror movie hillbilly.

Meantime, it is with great pleasure that I can now say things like: ± 5µV/√Hz at 300°K …

That was possible a year ago...

As minimum, square root wasn't possible. Also I gave up on using any symbols. It's pretty much pointless to make a post just to figure out which 10% of them will work, as preview would show everything correctly. Then edit to redo everything, nothing but waste of time.

[Ampera]

I mean, regardless of what you say, you could have always taken a screencap of the text and, if you were very clever, embedded it into the text of the page, which would be seamless some of the time on some versions of the forum site.

This, however, definitely makes text input way nicer. It's only rarely that I face this problem, but it comes up every so often.

[T3sl4co1l]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Thank you for your hard work, admins

Tim

[Ampera]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

THIS WAS A MISTAKE

BURN THE FORUMS, THERE IS NO FIXING THIS 

[Karel]

Not all datasheets are in English by default.

Most of them are. So, again, how can an electronics engineer do his job if can't read basic english?

[Ampera]

So your telling me that EEs around the world in Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, every single one of them has to and can speak basic English. What about in the former Soviet Union? There weren't any English datasheets then. What about in places like China, where the are almost a billion native Mandarin speakers.

[RoGeorge]

± 5µV/√Hz at 300 K

WTF where did the ± come from !

[Karel]

So your telling me that EEs around the world in Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, every single one of them has to and can speak basic English.

No, I didn't say that...

[Ampera]

"Most of them are. So, again, how can an electronics engineer do his job if can't read basic english?"

How can an EE do his job if he can't read basic English.

I don't know what you intended, but in the English I was taught, saying that all EEs can't do their job if they can't read basic English, which is what you said, means exactly that. Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

[Karel]

Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

Practically, yes. How else can they do their job?

[Ampera]

Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

Practically, yes. How else can they do their job?

By reading datasheets that are printed in another language, like Mandarin.

[RoGeorge]

TBH, I don't remember any EE engineer I've ever met that couldn't understand English. Most of them can also speak and write the language.

[coppice]

Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

Practically, yes. How else can they do their job?

By reading datasheets that are printed in another language, like Mandarin.

Most of the EEs in China never touch anything but Mandarin text books and documentation. Japan is similar. Most of them know some English, but only a small percentage know English well enough to be able to cope with an English book.

[RoGeorge]

It's not only about the English datasheets. It's the CAD/CAM software, and computers, too.

Until just years ago, computers were all English (without the Unicode havoc  ), and EE CAD/CAM tools were teach in schools, together with programming classes, which were English, too. That is why, in EE Universities we have had English classes, which were not optional. Instead, there was an option to choose between beginner or advanced English.

About the amount of English in datasheets, I bet the datasheet vocabulary is about 100 words, or so. Same for programming.

[helius]

Seriously, what are you on about? Localization has been widespread for 30 years.
In the classic MacOS, German, French, and Italian versions of the system were available only a couple years after the platform was announced.
KanjiTalk was released in 1986! WorldScript, with CJK, Hebrew, Arabic, etc, was released in 1993 with System 7.1.
I know Windows had something similar, but not the exact dates. It certainly existed by the Windows 3.1 timeframe (1992).

[RoGeorge]

Localization available, yes, widespread used, not so sure. At least not here, in Romania. While we have officially Romanian keyboards, basically nobody is using them. Special characters in writing? Nobody cares. In fact, I've seen people in their 20's or 30's writing handwritten text on paper without using the Romanian diacritics, like they were handwriting with ASCII , which is pretty weird if you ask me.

Localization was used mostly by occasional computer users. It was, and it is still weird. The localized translations are hilarious and misleading. Then, it was the Windows legacy. As opposed to Linux, Windows does not have had a mechanism to localize dialogues and software messages. I don't know if Windows 7/10 have a localization mechanism embedded into OS, but until XP, I didn't has one. Mac/Apples were more like a curiosity here.

There might be other parts of the world where localization is used, but here and for EE, not so much. In fact, at all.

I remember when we were doing some automation for the power grid. The requirement was that all the messages, buttons and dialogues must be in Romanian. Well, it was a pain to translate it, almost impossible. For example, there were sentences when various messages were composed using parts of a sentence. Like "There are" and "no errors". This example is trivial, but some sentences were really tricky, composed by 2-3 parts, and could not be assembled in Ro by the same logic as in En. The phrase structure was different.

Well, eventually we manage to translate that software (it was from General Electric, so native English we could say), but then guess what: we start deploying the translated software all over the country, then when we arrived to the North East side, many engineers in the power stations were less proficient in Romanian, they were speaking Hungarian, so they almost couldn't understand the Romanian translations. Yet, they were proficient in English.

Localization is for occasional computer users, heavy users use US English, at least here, where I live. All the company I worked for, I mean ALL of them, were using English in computers and CAD/CAM, and some of those companies were using English in Emails and meetings, too.

[Karel]

Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

Practically, yes. How else can they do their job?

By reading datasheets that are printed in another language, like Mandarin.

Where do you find them at, for example, the website of Texas Instruments?

[Monkeh]

Every single EE, around the world, as you stated, without any additional localization or clarifications, must read basic English.

Practically, yes. How else can they do their job?

By reading datasheets that are printed in another language, like Mandarin.

Where do you find them at, for example, the website of Texas Instruments?

http://www.ti.com.cn/product/cn/MSP430FR2000/technicaldocuments

That took, like, three seconds.