alt Hacker NewsOne of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
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Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
> how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)