Unicode fun

[jere7my]

Typography overload! I'm browsing the character set installed with OSX; there are thousands, IPA characters and Hangul and the "interrobang" (a question mark superimposed on an exclamation point) and the "not normal subgroup of or equal to" symbol. There is a whole set of symbols used by dentists. I didn't know there were so many symbols in the whole world—what a feast!

If there are users of OSX out there who don't know about this, you can access the character set by selecting "Show Character Palette" from the keyboard drop-down menu, then selecting "View: Unicode" from the pop-up menu. I adore the Yi syllabary, though I don't know whence it comes; there's something appealing about these friendly rounded forms and simple geometries, and I find myself positively disposed toward these Yi people without knowing who they are. Each character looks like a bathroom-door gender marker for a different alien race.

The most beautiful characters, of those I have available, are Tibetan, with their tripartate yin-yang symbols and elegant tails. But there are many holes in my character set; where do I find Linear B, or the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics?

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I think the Yi are somewhere in or near southern China, but I'm not sure of that.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Er, sorry about the deleted extra comment -- that was weird. I had thought at first you were talking about gaps in Unicode itself (of which there are still plenty), but then realized that you were actually talking about gaps in the font. There are probably more complete ones that you can download, but I'm not sure where (or exactly what you have to do to install a Unicode font on OS X.)

[antimony.livejournal.com]

For anyone else looking for it, I found it (also on OS X) by going to Edit -> Special Characters... in Finder. Dunno where the keyboard menu is, though. I didn't realize quite how much had been allocated space in Unicode. Cool.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

The keyboard menu is that little American flag you probably have next to your clock.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

In Jaguar, it's actually next to the Help menu, and you have to go to the international panel in Systems Preferences and select multiple keyboard layouts for it to show up.

Yay Panther!

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

I do all of my ling homework without having to use the special IPA fonts; I just have the most common ones, like ð and ŋ, in my favorites. In most cases, I still use the option shortcuts for doing ¨ and ´, but those won't apply to all characters, like the unicode versions will.

One of my away messages is "ɪf ju kæn ɹid ðɪs, θei̭nk ʌ lɪŋwɪst".

Note that if you can't see any of the special characters in this post, you need to get your Unicode on.

Oh the irony...

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

Looks like LJ doesn't like the diphthong diacritic.

Re: Yay Panther!

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

the 'n' in 'thank' should be an engma, and there should be a 'g' after the engma in 'linguist'. :-P

Re: Yay Panther!

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

And weirdly, all of them (except the diacritic) show up fine in Safari, but some of them don't in Firefox and Mozilla. Sigh. Eventually Unicode will work everywhere...

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

Nifty! I didn't know about this. And I agree that the Tibetan characters are gorgeous. Thanks!