I want to display some single-line badges (with rounded corners) in terminal but I am not aware of any box characters to use for start and end of labels. Are there any?
The label text would be normal text on coloured background, the only issue is that i need some elements to make it more visually appealing.
Not semicircles, but there will be more box-type graphics characters soon. Unicode 13.0, scheduled for March 2020*, will have a new block: "Symbols for Legacy Computing". This was designed for emulation of various 1970s and '80s computers, but some of the characters could also be useful for more modern purposes. This PDF has the code chart.
*Of course, that's just when the codepoints become official, you will still need to find a font that has the characters.
Apparently this is not possible as I failed to find any Unicode characters that do that.
The only one closer to enabling building a badge-like construct is U+258C also known as left half block: ▌.
Its sibling is U+2590.
Obviously that it does not have rounded corners so this would not help a lot visually.
Related
In xcode, developing for iOS "\u{1F3F3}\u{FE0F}\u{200D}\u{1F308}" is a rainbow flag.
"\u{1F3F3}" is a white flag, and "\u{1F308}" is a rainbow. The middle symbols "\u{FE0F}\u{200D}" are invisible symbols used to join these two together to make the rainbow flag symbol.
I am trying to combine unicode characters to make a rainbow infinity symbol, but not exactly sure how to implement this.
Not sure if there is an already existing unicode character or apple api I can use to do this, but would appreciate learning how to do this
I wouldn't mind having an infinity symbol over the rainbow flag either (like the apple anti-lgbt flag incident) as an alternative.
Emoji fonts are still just fonts. If they don’t contain a specific glyph, then they cannot display that glyph. The reason “🏳️🌈” looks like a rainbow flag is because someone drew a picture of a rainbow flag and then defined their font in such a way that the sequence <U+1F3F3, U+FE0F, U+200D, U+1F308> would be displayed using that specific image. Much like how someone first had to define the precise shape of the letter “A” in their font and then apply that glyph to the codepoint U+0041.
There is no image-rendering code that instinctively knows how to apply the colours of 🌈 to the shape of 🏳️ and then automatically generates a new glyph on the fly. It’s all explicitly pre-defined.
U+200D is the so-called Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ), so emoji sequences using that character are appropriately named Zero Width Joiner Sequences. They were originally invented by Apple to support emoji that weren’t part of the Unicode standard (in particular, variants of 💏, 💑, and 👪️ with different gender configurations), but later other vendors jumped on board as well and nowadays they are officially part of Unicode as an alternative way for defining new emoji without having to encode entirely new characters. Currently, about a third of all officially recommended emoji are ZWJ sequences.
In theory, any person can make up their own ZWJ sequences just by joining existing characters together (as was their original intent). In your case, “♾️+ZWJ+🌈” or <U+267E, U+FE0F, U+200D, U+1F308> would be an obvious sequence for a rainbow-coloured infinity symbol. You just have to create your own font containing the glyph you want, and then distribute that font to other people so that they can see the same glyph as you. There are just a few problems:
Making fonts with colourful glyphs is not easy. I couldn’t tell you whether there even exist freely available tools for that task.
There are four different formats for emoji fonts (used by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla respectively) and they generally do not work on each other’s platforms, so you would need to create not just one, but several fonts unless you don’t care about people on other operating systems.
Installing your own fonts is not possible on most mobile phones, so your custom emoji would mostly only be available to desktop users.
I am using Ubuntu 14.04, with FontForge compiled from the Git repo as of 31
July.
I'm trying to add a vowel-sign to an Arabic font, Graph, by Future Soft Egypt:
http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/graph
I have added glyphs where the Unicode code-point already exists (eg peh,
U+067E), and that works fine. I am now trying to add a vowel sign where no
Unicode code-point exists - it is a "damma with tail", used by some writers in
Swahili to mean "o".
I decided to put it in the PUA at U+E909, and copied the font's damma (U+064F)
and added a tail:
http://kevindonnelly.org.uk/swahili/images/dammas.png
I generated the font, and set up the keyboard to emit that character.
The glyph comes up OK, but there are two problems, as can be seen here:
http://kevindonnelly.org.uk/swahili/images/output.png
showing at top "bubu", using the original damma, and at bottom "bobo", using
the new damma-with-tail.
(1) The damma-with-tail is too far to the left, even though the anchor points
in FF have not been moved.
(2) Worse, the damma-with-tail means that only the isolated versions of the
consonant glyphs get used - in the second line the two bs should be joined, as
in the first line.
I'm not sure whether this is a function of using the PUA, or whether it's due
to my missing some step I need to take in FF (eg the Encoding -> Add Encoding
Slots that needs to be done for the consonants), but if anyone could shed some
light on how to fix the two problems, I'd be very grateful.
Does unicode have characters in it similar to stuff like the things formed by the <kbd> tag in HTML? I want to use it as part of a game to indicate that the user can press a key to perform a certain action, for example:
Press R to reset, or S to open the settings menu.
Are there characters for that? I don't need anything fancy like ⇧ Shift or Tab ⇆, single-letter keys are plenty. I am looking for something that would work somewhat like the Enclosed Alphanumerics subrange.
If there are characters for that, where could I find a page describing them? All the google searches I tried turned only turned up "unicode character keyboard shortcuts" stuff.
If there are not characters for that, how can I display something like that as part of (or at least in line with) a text string in Processing 2.0.1?
(The rendering referred to is not the default rendering of kbd, which simply shows the content in the system’s default monospace font. But e.g. in StackOverflow pages, a style sheet is used to format kbd so that it looks like a keycap.)
Somewhat surprisingly, there is a Unicode way to create something that looks like a character in a keycap: enter the character, then immediately COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP U+20E3.
Font support to this character is very limited but contains a few free fonts. Unfortunately, none of them is a sans-serif font, and the character to be shown inside should normally appear in such a font – after all, real keycaps contains very simple shapes for characters, without serifs. And generally, a character and an enclosing mark should be taken from the same font; otherwise they might be incompatible. However, it seems that taking the normal character from the sans-serif font (FreeSans) in GNU Freefont and the combining mark from the serif font (FreeSerif) of the same source creates a reasonable presentation:
I’m afraid it won’t work here in text, but I’ll try: A⃣ .
Whether this works depends on the use of suitable fonts, as mentioned, but also on the rendering software. Programs have been rather bad at displaying combining marks, but there has been some improvement. I tested this in Word 2007, where it works OK, and also on web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) with good results using code like this:
<style>
.cap { font-family: FreeSerif; }
.cap span { font-family: FreeSans; }
</style>
<span class="cap"><span>A</span>⃣</span>
It isn’t perfect, when using the fonts mentioned. The character in the cap is not quite centered. Moreover, if I try to use the technique e.g. for the character Å (which is present on normal Nordic keyboards), the ring above A extends out of the cap. You could tweak this by setting the font size of the letter in the cap to, say, 85% of the font size of the combining mark, but then the horizontal position of the letter is even more off.
To summarize, it is possible to do such things at the character level, but if you can use other methods, like using a border or a background image for a character, you can probably achieve better rendering.
Appart from the visual aspect... do those tick symbols have any different semantics?
I mean: One is thin and the other bold. But... any special meaning for one or the other? Or it is just a matter of using one graphical aspect or another?
Unlike the majority of characters in Unicode, the Dingbats range U+27xx have no particular semantic content. The 'heavy' check mark has no meaning beyond 'a check mark that is visually bolder than the other one'; contrast this with the 'bold' letters in plane that have a mathematical meaning.
This range of characters comes from the symbol font Zapf Dingbats. Symbol fonts are visual in nature and don't fit well in Unicode, but Zapf Dingbats has historical significance as a one of the PostScript core font set guaranteed to be available on PS printers. Subsequently characters from Zapf Dingbats have commonly been used in document interchange, making it worthwhile to standardise them.
Appart from the visual aspect.
There's no appart here, the visual aspect is King in Unicode. U+2713 is a check mark. U+2714 is a heavy check mark. It should appear as a bolder version of U+2713 if you have a decent font.
These codepoints are in a group named Dingbats, a group of typographical symbols. Chess pieces, arrows, asterisks, that sort of thing. There's no semantic meaning attached to them. It is just heavier.
I am looking for an online service (or collection of images) that can return an image for any unicode code point.
Unicode.org does not have an image for each one, consider for example
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=31cf
EDIT: I need to use these images programmatically, so the code chart PDFs provided at unicode.org are not useful.
The images in the PDF are copyrighted, so there are legal issues around extracting them. (I am not a lawyer.) I suspect that those legal issues prevent a simple solution from being provided, unless someone wants to go to the trouble of drawing all of those images. It might happen, but seems unlikely.
Your best bet is to download a selection of fonts that collectively cover the entire range of characters, and display the characters using those fonts. There are two difficulties with this approach: combining characters and invisible characters.
The combining characters can easily be detected from the Unicode database, and you can supply a base character (such as NBSP) to use for displaying them. (There is a special code point intended for this purpose, but I can't find it at the moment.)
Invisible characters could be displayed with a dotted square box containing the abbreviation for the character. Those you may have to locate manually and construct the necessary abbreviations. I am not aware of any shortcuts for that.