Unicode. It defines a supposedly universal system of codes for writing 
all the languages of the world. Thanks to Unicode, non-ASCII characters 
are no longer the broken mess that they once were; you can write 
non-ASCII characters and have a reasonable chance of it actually working 
in more than one application.

What it perhaps less known is that Unicode also has codepoints for 
really, *really* obscure stuff - alphabets that haven't been written for 
thousands of years, such as Linear-B, Cuneiform, etc. This stuff is 
presumably highly useful to scholars of ancient languages - and utterly 
useless to the rest of human civilisation.

But what I didn't know was this:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf

For real. This is an actual thing.

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Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> What it perhaps less known is that Unicode also has codepoints for
> really, *really* obscure stuff

Hmm, it seems that Cirth[1] and Tengwar[2] are still not in there, but 
they are noted on the roadmap[3].

[1] http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1642/n1642.htm
[2] http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1641/n1641.htm
[3] http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/

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On Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:01:21 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> This stuff is presumably highly useful to scholars of ancient languages
> - and utterly useless to the rest of human civilisation.

Well, ancient language scholars use computers, too. ;)

The link you found, though - very interesting.  I wonder...

😹

Yep, it's in the GNOME3 charmap app. :)

Jim

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>> This stuff is presumably highly useful to scholars of ancient languages
>> - and utterly useless to the rest of human civilisation.
>
> Well, ancient language scholars use computers, too. ;)

Indeed.

> The link you found, though - very interesting.  I wonder...
>
> 😹
>
> Yep, it's in the GNOME3 charmap app. :)

I was wondering... Just because a Unicode codepoint exists, does not 
mean that any font anywhere on Earth actually has a glyph for it. But 
apparently whatever monospace font Thunderbird uses does... (Not that 
the glyph is legible.)

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On Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:08:15 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> The link you found, though - very interesting.  I wonder...
>>
>> 😹
>>
>> Yep, it's in the GNOME3 charmap app. :)
> 
> I was wondering... Just because a Unicode codepoint exists, does not
> mean that any font anywhere on Earth actually has a glyph for it. But
> apparently whatever monospace font Thunderbird uses does... (Not that
> the glyph is legible.)

Well, true, and I see many unicode characters in the charmap application 
that don't render for me.

But it's fun to see that there are a lot that do.  I was surprised when I 
was looking at the Egyptian hieroglyphs codepage that those actually do 
render on my system.

Jim

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