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simonh 7 months ago

Unicode does not specify any fonts, though many fonts are defined to be consistent with the Unicode standard, nevertheless they are emphatically not part of Unicode.

How symbols including diacritics are drawn and displayed is not a concern for Unicode, different fonts can interpret 'filled circle' or the weight of a glyph as they like, just as with emoji. By convention they generally adopt common representations but not entirely. For example try using the box drawing characters from several different fonts together. Some work, many don't.

kristopolous 7 months ago | parent [-]

You can say things like the different "styles" that exploit Unicode on a myriad of websites such as https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=Hello are not technically "fonts" but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. You have script, fraktur, bold, monospace, italic...

simonh 7 months ago | parent [-]

Fraktur is interesting because it’s more a writing style, verging in a character set in its own right. However Unicode doesn’t directly support all of its ligatures and such.

None of this is in any way justification for turning Unicode into something like SVG. Even the pseudo-drawing capabilities it does have are largely for legacy reasons.

kristopolous 7 months ago | parent [-]

Fraktur at one point was genuinely a different script

You can find texts in the late 1500-early 1900s at least that will switch to a fraktur style when quoting or using German.

ANSI escape codes even accommodates for it. Codepoint 20: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Select_Grap...

Don't ask me why, I only work here.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...

I also don't find any of my predictions defensible as much as I believe they're inevitable. Again I've got no agency here.