General > General Technical Chat
Forum member's country flags
Zero999:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 17, 2021, 05:52:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on May 17, 2021, 04:35:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 10:17:46 am ---Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported?
--- End quote ---
Easy - don't assume, use what you really need. Simply because something is just technically possible and novel, doesn't mean you have to use it. Don't expect new features, especially unnecessary gimmicks to work.
--- Quote ---I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported,
--- End quote ---
Indeed, let's hope that. I think it's fairly safe assumption they work 99.99% of the time because everybody have been using computers to produce the symbols in question since 1990's, they are not some unnecessary few-years-old gimmick like the flags.
--- End quote ---
The fact that emoji spread from a Japan-only SMS novelty to something fundamentally supported on all platforms and used on a daily basis would hint at them not being “unnecessary gimmicks”. Being dismissive of it is just gonna get you in trouble, if you’re a developer of any kind. FWIW, Linux was the last major holdout platform; Mac and Windows have had emoji support for a decade at this point, it’s nothing new.
What irks me a lot more is the small number of things that still don’t support Unicode at all. It’s shrinking, but… why?!? Developers should have moved to Unicode around the turn of the millennium.
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 04:01:28 pm ---I'm perplexed at why any OS would go to the trouble of implementing useless parts of the Unicode standard, like turd emojis, whilst ignoring more useful things such as country flags. :palm:
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It’s clearly not a technical limitation, since it’s not as though they’d need a separate code path. Emoji are nothing more than color bitmap or vector glyphs. Our OSes have supported color text rendering for ages (including pixel-level color, thanks to code paths for both grayscale and subpixel antialiasing), they’ve supported bitmap fonts for even longer, and so it likely wasn’t a big deal to allow color fonts.
Note that extra code is only needed for color emoji support; one could, in theory, install a black-and-white emoji font to any OS whose Unicode implementation has Supplementary Multilingual Plane support. (Which any self-respecting implementation does, since all sorts of useful character blocks are among those.)
Nobody knows for sure, but the leading theory is that Microsoft is attempting to avoid the issue of flags of disputed areas like Taiwan. This has been at times troublesome for other vendors.
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 17, 2021, 10:17:46 am ---Given that Unicode support is patchy across platforms: how is one supposed to know what glyphs are widely supported? I hope that the important Greek letters and symbols such as μ, Ω, π , Δ, ° etc. used in electronics widely supported, otherwise we might as well stick with plain old ASCII. :palm:
--- End quote ---
”Patchy” is quite an overstatement. Every major platform has Unicode support now, and has had it for years. The issue of glyphs is, for the most part, not one of Unicode support, but of the fonts. But frankly, that problem is also one that was solved ages ago. The symbols you list are ones that were fully supported in the very earliest Unicode fonts. (In fact, they were also supported in many 8-bit character sets. As someone who’s been a Mac user since the early 90s, I have never owned a computer whose default character set didn’t include all 5 glyphs you listed, since the old Mac Roman character set included them all.)
The only places where Unicode seems to still not be supported properly (or at least not always by default) is in some web server backends (like if a forum’s backend database is mistakenly configured as some ASCII code page instead of Unicode), the Windows DOS prompt, and things like basic ANSI C. In contrast, every major platform (and most minor ones) uses Unicode for its text handling APIs, so a developer using the APIs should get Unicode support for free.
What annoys me is Luddite admins and devs who, when encountering an issue with Unicode, instead of fixing it just takes the lazy way out and says “use ASCII instead”, contributing to the dragged-out transition to Unicode.
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I had a play with flags and emojis in LibreOffice. They work, but are all monochrome, which is fine as it could be printed in monochrome, apart from the French flag and no doubt others consisting of just stripes. The really lame thing is they're all circles rather than squares.
TimFox:
--- Quote from: harerod on May 17, 2021, 05:23:19 pm ---TimFox, there are books with this kind of information. However, we try to keep those from the general American public. :)
The neural nets of native speakers are trained by huge amounts of native speaker input. Since ain't nobody got time for that, we learners try to find shortcuts, a.k.a. rules for what you have developed a gut feeling for. Those rules are far from perfect, but help us get started.
For a while I took the country flags as a pointer about that person's cultural background. For instance, I see tooki's Swiss flag, so I won't use an idiom like "in the ballpark" when addressing him, because he might not be familiar with baseball...
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One of the best books about grammar that I have read recently (which I can't find now) pointed out that grammar textbooks are not very useful for native speakers of the language, but are very useful for those learning it as a second language.
mathsquid:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 17, 2021, 06:10:54 pm ---
Indeed, the only native speakers who truly, thoroughly understand and can verbalize all* the rules of their own language are the ones who’ve worked for years teaching their language to nonnative speakers, since those students ask the deep “why?”
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I'll share a related anecdote.
I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").
I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".
gnuarm:
--- Quote from: mathsquid on May 17, 2021, 07:46:18 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on May 17, 2021, 06:10:54 pm ---
Indeed, the only native speakers who truly, thoroughly understand and can verbalize all* the rules of their own language are the ones who’ve worked for years teaching their language to nonnative speakers, since those students ask the deep “why?”
--- End quote ---
I'll share a related anecdote.
I occasionally proofread stuff for a colleague whose first language isn't English. One time he had written that something happened "in November 12." I corrected it to "on November 12" and he asked why. I didn't have a good answer for him--I just knew which was right. His reasoning was that when we say a month, we use "in" (e.g. "in April") and when we use a day, we use "on" (e.g. "on the 10th" or "on Tuesday").
I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days, and that "november 12" is a day, and thus we use "in".
--- End quote ---
A day is a specific date and so "on" indicates that date exactly. Any longer period of time would use "in" since it only indicates the date generally within that time frame.
But I agree that native speakers often don't know why they speak the way they do. A fellow grad student was asking me the difference between special/specially and special/especially. The dictionary indicated they were the same. I told him I never hear anyone say "specially" or "especial" but that was just my familiarity.
He was a good guy, an Iranian prior to the Shah being deposed. I think he was not a Shah supporter, but he didn't talk about it much, just once. There were a lot of Iranian students at the time and he seemed to be someone most of them deferred to, so perhaps he was from a family with authority. He was very intelligent and wanting to learn as much as he could about pretty much everything.
newbrain:
--- Quote from: mathsquid on May 17, 2021, 07:46:18 pm ---I had never considered any rule, but we worked out that "in" goes with months, and "on" goes with days,
--- End quote ---
And for added fun, "at" goes with time.
So something happened in November, on the 12th, at 9.
If you really squint, you might say that one goes from the most general "in", to something that defines better the position (in time) "on", to something specific "at".
In Italian, it's more mixed.
That would be "di novembre, il 12, alle 9"
Literally "of", "the", "at the".
Similarly, Swedish and French:
"i november, den 12, klockan 9"
"in", ~"the" (complicated...), "the clock", often abbreviated as kl.
"en novembre, le 12, à 9 heure"
"in", "the", "at".
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