Unicode

[rhowaldt]

during my recent customizations i ran into the following issue: there is no wifi-symbol inside the Unicode Character Set. that seems quite perplexing, but have a Google, or pore over the lists as i have done, and surely you won't find it (because it doesnt exist).

i was thinking about this, and decided to have a look on the Unicode website, to get a feel for how the organization works. i then came across a list of "Proposed New Characters". here is the list of characters that is "in the pipeline". i figured, maybe somebody has submitted the wifi-symbol to the committee, and it will be added with the next version (even though that would also seem damn long overdue). looking through the list, one can see numerous interesting additions, such as a bottle with a popping cork, a cricket bat and ball, and an upside-down smileyface. the most striking thing, however, is what is so glaringly missing from this list: the fucking wifi-symbol.

there's also a list of "notices of non-approval", but it doesnt indicate they ever refused to add the wifi-symbol. Klingon, however, is clearly out.

the Unicode Committee are such an open bunch, which is really nice. here, from browsing along into the Public Review section, we find that it is possible to give your opinion on non-standard terminology in the naming of certain Unicode items[url]. we might also want to be on the looko ... code emoji. important shit. clearly more important than a wifi-symbol, because that doesn't seem to be on review either.

i then proceeded to look through the entire Unicode character set (well, the relevant categories of course) once again. you'd expect a wifi-symbol to be somewhere in this bigass list: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf - but you'd be wrong.
just to be sure, i did a Ctrl+F to search the page for wifi or anything like it. nothing. just to be extra sure, i looked at the Character Name Index, under the letter W. nothing.
on this site, the query "wireless" gave me 8 results. none of them are a wifi-symbol.

so now i ask you, brothers, sisters, whomever: what the actual fuck is going on here? Unicode, y u no do wifi?

[dkeg]

I'm new to this whole area. I grabbled stlarch font for some characters, and lemon has some too. So with

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echo -e '\uE047'

I get a wireless symbol

In your .Xresources, you would then have

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*font: -artwiz-lime-medium-r-normal--10-110-75-75-m-50-iso8859-1,-misc-stlarch-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1

That's about all I got for you now.

[Dr_Chroot]

On a related subject, I wonder if it is at all possible to print all available symbols out? I am able to copy/paste a few from others configs but it is a little tedious to

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echo -e '\uE001'

and so on. Is there some utility built into X.org that will list all of the available characters?

[dkeg]

I started to build a list, but did so by manually testing different combinations, etc. Required fonts would be stlarch and lemon. Obviously the icons won't look right in your browser. Unless your on elinks or using lemon as your gtk font (like me!)

There are some duplicates I did not add like horizontal style battery, or consecutive ones, have only the say ...30, not also the 31,32,33 etc. These are also like bookmarkings to have an easier time finding stuff.

Edit: should put the list elsewhere

[wuxmedia]

Yeah I see what you mean Rhow, crazy, I thought it may be a copyright bullshit, but no.
ѽ -was my suggestion :) in fact unless you want to do the i-ching, or a million arrows, the non letters are a bit wack.
ש - in hebrew?

this site is pretty useful:
http://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/0020-007F
"Candian aboriginal symbols" WTF?

maybe we should propose one?

[rhowaldt]

@wux: i like those Canadian Aboriginal characters :)
i am currently using ⚶ which approaches it.
looked into proposing one quickly the other day, but you can't just email them and go "hey Unicode ppl, y u no wifi-symbol!?!?", you need to have graphics and shit at the ready for them, and a proper name that isn't racist or non-uniform or whatever. so yeah. dunno. if there are people in our group who feel like they could help out with this then sure, let's do a proposal. it just seemed like there was too much shit i dont know enough about required.

@Drew: hmm yeah, i noticed the fontawesome icon set had some useful stuff in it, and your method would indeed be a good way to get to it, but it still seems strange it isnt just part of the Unicode Standard.

[wuxmedia]

http://unicode-table.com/en/1F4F6 ..nearly

[rhowaldt]

^ yep, forgot to mention, found that one too. however, do you know how to actually use it on your system? Geany doesnt recognize it, for example.

so there's another thing i dont really get about this Unicode thing... why are only certain symbols recognized and not others? or has this to do with the font?

[wuxmedia]

^ yup - fonts again, if you look on that site you can check if it's on the MScorefonts as well.
I tried to get "universalia" used on that site, but couldn't find after a quick goog. maybe it's a webfont.

Packs of fucking cards (Tried posting Mysql said "no"), I mean WTF - really... no Wifi symbol?
I had a look at submitting something useful, and bailed like you.

[rhowaldt]

yes, it is quite amazing when you think about it. maybe we should start some sort of viral interweb-outrage about this, work our way around their protocols.
damn fonts. makes sense though: getting all of Unicode in your fontset, ain't nobody got time for dat. cant be fucked to make that into a meme, one of you kids do that.

[stark]

Bloat Alert!

I personally use fontforge ( supports plethora of font formats )

There's xorg-xfd ( which I couldn't figure out how to use )

And there's gbdfed ( only bdf fonts )

If you want to avoid fontforge then you may try installing gbdfed ( lighter than fontforge ) and use pcf2bdf to convert the font from pcf to bdf, then open it up in gbdfed and get the hexcodes

[dkeg]

can you export the codes to a txt file and share?

You're showing codes for stlarch, correct?

Some requests ...
What is the code for the music notes, play, pause
(edit) And wireless for rho!

Thanks!

[Dr_Chroot]

YOU DA BOMB, STARK! Thanks for xfd; this is fantastic :)

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xfd -fn -misc-stlarch-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1

No bloat or extra packages need; came with Xorg :DDD

[dkeg]

Cool, I'll have to check that out tonight

[stark]

Thanks so much Doc! I'm so fucking stupid.

[Dr_Chroot]

^ No sweat dude! The xfd interface is a tad bit rougher than fontforge, so it is all a matter if GTK is wanted or not :)

[stark]

If anyone is wondering where is the code for the glyphs then, it starts from the 'e' in 'character 0x00e000' ( in the first line where it showed select a character before you clicked on a glyph ), so your glyph code is 'e000'.

[rhowaldt]

is it not possible to get a list of the codes for each gliph, as dkeg asked? i would look into it myself if i was home, and i absolutely dont mean it like "you do the work, bitch", so please dont feel obliged to do anything. mainly just interested how one would go about getting those codes. there must be a good way to make a oneliner and retrieve a list of sorts, no?

[dkeg]

YOU DA BOMB, STARK! Thanks for xfd; this is fantastic :)

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xfd -fn -misc-stlarch-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1

No bloat or extra packages need; came with Xorg :DDD

Excellent, and great find stark. Wow. Like DC says, was already there. Works perfectly!

Not sure how to get them all out into one file, and with the associated glyph. Hmmm. I guess you could take the range and loop through, echo'ing each one, sending to an output file. Maybe some [awk?] magic to get all possible values;

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e000 > e0ff;

where it would be all possible combinations of

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e0[a-f,1-9][a-f,1-9]

What do you guys think?

[stark]

I tried to generate a list with fontforge but failed to do so miserably ( just produced a blank file )

As dkeg said maybe a brace expansion like: echo -e "\ue"{000..010} would do it. But not all of them are in numbers so different combinations of brace expansion maybe ? I can manually write the glyph codes and take a scrot of each glyph individually ( no other way to distinguish them as the glyphs have no name built into them ) but its going to take some time.

Edit: Weird.