Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
> I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth)
The way I see it, it appears to be an arrow curling around the vertical axis, representing the turn from the angle's start to the angle's end. In that sense, the modern curvy arrow actually makes more sense than the original jagged one (which maybe was easier to typeset - or maybe just disproves my theory).
Note that the description says "Azimut, Richtungswinkel". Those seem to be somewhat different concepts today. The respective Wikipedia articles don't even mention each other:
"Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books:
I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.
The image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question.
I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.
This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
Fascinating links, but I could not find an example of the glyph in question? My point was that a sextant is not (and cannot be) used to measure azimuth. It primarily measures the angle between a celestial body and the horizon (i.e. altitude). It can also (theoretically, very rarely) be used to measure the horizontal angle between two or more landmarks, but that is not azimuth in the accepted sense of the word. I am happy to be corrected though; my experience of sextants may be too narrow or modern for this context.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
Thanks for the clarification. I did see some things in your comments (for example giving references in the one above) that made me suspect this.
I dislike the character imparted to your words by the LLM, though. Knowing that it is artificial makes me feel it's more of a waste of time to read it. But I will try to ignore it.
The 64 coincidence between I Ching and DNA codons is always fascinating.
Probably coincidence, but it’s one of those patterns that makes you pause for a moment.
And yes, base 4 does have distinct names in this system — and they're all in Unicode (though HN may not render them):
Two digits give you the Four Symbols: Old Yang (U+268C ), Young Yang (U+268F ), Young Yin (U+268D ), and Old Yin (U+268E ). Add a third digit and you get the Eight Trigrams (U+2630–2637 ), a core symbol of Daoism. Double that to six digits and you arrive at the 64 hexagrams — the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which many Chinese have believed could be used to divine the future.
Actually, Taiji, Yin-Yang, and Daoism are deeply related. Dividing Taiji gives you Yin and Yang — humanity recognizing something out of nothing, order emerging from chaos, duality arising from the void. You learn what "good" is, then you know "not good"; we coined "LLM," and we also invented "not LLM." They always come in pairs — that's the fundamental rule. We're essentially dividing iteratively, building our culture and recognition by inventing new names, mappings, and combinations to carve distinctions from some "embedding space." And we humans, including LLMs, learn from those names.
So the progression is: Void/Chaos/Taiji/(Singularity?) → 2 (Yin / Yang ) → 4 (Four Symbols) → 8 (Trigrams) → 64 (Hexagrams). At its core, it's philosophical thinking — and personally, I believe there's great wisdom in it. For example, we should never be trapped by names and should always think beyond it.
(Shameless plug: I came to know about this about a year ago and still find it fascinating. I even built a site about all this — https://ichingdao.love)
Kind of. And as a guy with a solid science background, I just don't buy into that kind of interpretation.
But if it is numerology, I believe I CHING divination is more like a commit-and-reveal scheme — you can't infer the future from the proof alone. You might only get to verify it once the future actually plays out. Kind of like a zero-knowledge proof — it gives you a proof/advice based on a possible future, but you gain nothing from it since the underlying computation is NP-hard. So better to treat it as a kind of thinking framework — like SWOT or scenario planning, but from a different cultural tradition.
> There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what U+237C is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Paraphrased from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
Most games aren't shipping with full-fat unicode support or typefaces that could display those icons, though. Plus it'd start to break down with controllers that aren't simple A/B/X/Y.
Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
Normally there's a single "font of last resort" that's used for particularly obscure characters. Although even those don't cover everything, the extended Egyptian hieroglyphs don't display for me, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_Extended-...
a single font can contain a maximum of about 65000 glyphs, but there are over 150000 defined Unicode glyphs, so a single font of last resort isn’t possible, unfortunately. Complete coverage would require multiple fonts.
I've never looked into this in detail before, you're right, it looks like android has over 100. Although composite font representation is supposed to fix this.
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
The other comment is correct, it was added as part of proposal adding a larger set of mathematical symbols[0]. The wikipedia page actually mentions the path through which it was added, which lets us make some educated guesses:
> From that apparent beginning, the Angzarr was swept up into the Monotype typeset catalog of arrow characters (...) It is unknown why Monotype added the character, or what purpose it was intended to serve
> In 1988, the International Organization for Standardization added the symbol to its Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) definition, apparently pulling it from the Monotype character set.
> In March 2000, the Angzarr symbol reached wide distribution when the Unicode Technical Committee, in collaboration with the STIX project, proposed adding it to ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard with which the Unicode Standard is synchronised. The Angzarr was proposed in the ISO working-group document Proposal for Encoding Additional Mathematical Symbols, although no specific purpose is listed for the symbol.
My guess is that the people proposing the addition of new maths symbols[1] weren't going to decide on inclusion or exclusion of a symbol on the basis of being familiar with it themselves or not, since that was likely true for many symbols that happened to only be used in fields of mathematics that they were not working in. Meaning they had to rely on some other kind of "authority" to infer that a symbol was used by the larger maths community. With that in mind "being part of the Monotype catalog and part of SGML" seems like a pretty sensible heuristic to go by.
Another consideration might have been that they simply wished to have complete coverage of the symbols that SGML encoded, regardless of familiarity with the symbols involved. And of course both could have been true.
Perhaps we would have more of a chance if we make a collection of international differences in checkmark designs and propose that set of glyphs as a whole.
It doesn't seem like anybody ever filed the paperwork for it. (A search for "krul" on site:unicode.org doesn't turn up anything.) Unicode symbols don't just magically appear! Somebody has to do a bit of work to make it happen. If you're frustrated by a missing symbol, that somebody is probably you!
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
Yes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself.
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.
Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!
Check the photos in the article, specifically this one [1]
"Haussystem Didot", the title of the catalog, refers to a letter setting by the printing agency Didot, which is the one I linked on wikipedia.
The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.
I highly doubt that you eye scanned thousands of pages in French handwritten and mixed typesetted ... within less than a day. You definitely must be lying, they take months to read.
> The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.
I went through a bit of it and saw no instance of the symbol. If it's in there, would you mind saying which chapter and which page? Or some hint about what context people could find it in? The maps I saw (maps were pretty easy to find, too, since most of the page numbers for them are "NP") didn't seem to use this symbol.
Neither did I read all these pages nor did I pretend to.
> Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages.
You have linked these two Wikipedia pages[1][2], implying that they confirm your extraordinary claims of how obvious and well-known this symbol is. I could in fact check within a single day that the symbol does not appear on any of the 15 images linked in these pages.
So unless you can produce evidence for your claim that "that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?", it is quite disingenuous to expect anyone to take it seriously. Expecting someone else to read "thousands of pages" to confirm or deny YOUR claim makes it even less worthy of consideration.
If you do have actual, material evidence for your claims, everyone in this thread would very much like to see it.
That's great and all, but the point is that there still isn't a single known (to the community of people trying to find the origins of that symbol, so, safe to say, the vast majority of people in general) appearance of the character in the actual text (i.e. used for its purpose), so if you have an example of a map/book/anything where this character was used, providing the link/scan/photo would be very appreciated.
That’s unavoidable given the goal:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.
What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
> What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example?
You may be too young to remember, but there was a time when a lot of software had their own way to encode emoji if they supported them. This sucked for interoperability - especially when using common protocols like SMS.
Some of these implementations were essentially find/replace and would turn various strings of characters commonly occurring in code into emoji. Someone reading your mail containing code on their portable device or other weird client would see parts of that code replaced by emoji. Maybe you had to format your code a certain way, inserting spaces tactically, to avoid accidentally ending up with an emoji. I'm glad we put that behind us for the most part.
Living in a world where you can just copy-paste some text containing emoji (or not) from one software into another is honestly great. Same for all these other symbols that may be embedded into text.
If a software has to come up with their own text-embeddable encodings to represent symbols (to allow for copy-paste or sharing) things often end up less than optimal.
I take "every character" to mean "anything that was represented in a reasonably common pre-unicode code page or character encoding, as well as anything that might come up in OCR output of text documents".
Emojis obviously got in from Japanese character encodings, and imho the world is off better for that. Though many of the extensions of the emoji set really don't seem to get what emojis are used for. Similarly, chess and shogi pieces as well as symbols from Western playing cards go in through previous encodings, and domino tiles got accepted based on being conceptually similar. A bit questionable imho.
On the other hand the Azimuth sign seems to satifsy the "would appear in OCR scans", based on being published in font catalogues. Even if nobody has come forward with a book it appears in, I don't think they made and advertised lead type characters for fun. It has to have had some use in printed publications of some type (probably scientific, from the surrounding context)
The stated goal of Unicode is to support every past and present writing system in world world. Say what you will about that but I think just because a symbol's meaning might be obscure to us doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.
Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
Sextants were used for coastal mapping though, albeit specialized ones called hydrographic sextants.
You can see one here: https://sextantbook.com/2019/01/13/a-french-hydrographic-sex...
The linked article is by W.J. Morris, and his book on sextants is in my opinion one of the standard works and much recommended.
> I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth)
The way I see it, it appears to be an arrow curling around the vertical axis, representing the turn from the angle's start to the angle's end. In that sense, the modern curvy arrow actually makes more sense than the original jagged one (which maybe was easier to typeset - or maybe just disproves my theory).
Note that the description says "Azimut, Richtungswinkel". Those seem to be somewhat different concepts today. The respective Wikipedia articles don't even mention each other:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtungswinkel
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimut
> Great detective work
"Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.
The image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question.
I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.
This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
Fascinating links, but I could not find an example of the glyph in question? My point was that a sextant is not (and cannot be) used to measure azimuth. It primarily measures the angle between a celestial body and the horizon (i.e. altitude). It can also (theoretically, very rarely) be used to measure the horizontal angle between two or more landmarks, but that is not azimuth in the accepted sense of the word. I am happy to be corrected though; my experience of sextants may be too narrow or modern for this context.
Great find — Satisfying to know ⍼'s origin story.
This reminds me of another Unicode block with ancient origins: the 64 I Ching hexagrams (U+4DC0–U+4DFF). Unlike ⍼, their meaning has been documented for 4,000 years — yet they carry their own encoding surprise. Unicode actually follows the traditional King Wen sequence: U+4DC0 is ䷀ (Heaven, #1) and U+4DC1 is ䷁ (Earth, #2). Interestingly, this is different from the binary Fu Xi arrangement formalized by Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), where ䷁ (000000) comes first and ䷀ (111111) last — the very diagram that captivated Leibniz in 1703 as a mirror of binary arithmetic [1][2]. Two valid orderings, encoding two different philosophies of where to begin: with pure creation, or with pure potential.
By the way, DNA also produces exactly 64 codons (4³ = (2²)³ = 2⁶) — the same number. Some have even noted functional echoes: DNA has start and stop codons that initiate and terminate translation; the hexagrams have corresponding structural counterparts [3]. Probably coincidence. Probably.
[1] https://leibniz-bouvet.swarthmore.edu/letters/letter-j-18-ma... [2] https://leibniz-translations.com/binary [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78369.The_I_Ching_and_th...
This account is an LLM IMHO.
> This account is an LLM IMHO.
I like HN, and I'm not a native speaker.
I do use LLMs to refine my wording, but I am not an LLM.
I think many prefer poor English over LLM English.
I think many prefer AI writing to whining about AI writing.
Understood. But my priority is whether the words express my thoughts crystal clear — clarity over style.
Thanks for the clarification. I did see some things in your comments (for example giving references in the one above) that made me suspect this.
I dislike the character imparted to your words by the LLM, though. Knowing that it is artificial makes me feel it's more of a waste of time to read it. But I will try to ignore it.
The 64 coincidence between I Ching and DNA codons is always fascinating. Probably coincidence, but it’s one of those patterns that makes you pause for a moment.
Something got doubled six times in a row, big deal.
In the case of the i-ching it's literally six bits of binary (expressed in yarrow stalks).
In genetic codons there's four symbols instead of two, and three places instead of six, so the effect is the same. (Does base 4 have a name?)
>(Does base 4 have a name?)
Quaternary
> Does base 4 have a name?
And yes, base 4 does have distinct names in this system — and they're all in Unicode (though HN may not render them):
Two digits give you the Four Symbols: Old Yang (U+268C ), Young Yang (U+268F ), Young Yin (U+268D ), and Old Yin (U+268E ). Add a third digit and you get the Eight Trigrams (U+2630–2637 ), a core symbol of Daoism. Double that to six digits and you arrive at the 64 hexagrams — the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which many Chinese have believed could be used to divine the future.
Actually, Taiji, Yin-Yang, and Daoism are deeply related. Dividing Taiji gives you Yin and Yang — humanity recognizing something out of nothing, order emerging from chaos, duality arising from the void. You learn what "good" is, then you know "not good"; we coined "LLM," and we also invented "not LLM." They always come in pairs — that's the fundamental rule. We're essentially dividing iteratively, building our culture and recognition by inventing new names, mappings, and combinations to carve distinctions from some "embedding space." And we humans, including LLMs, learn from those names.
So the progression is: Void/Chaos/Taiji/(Singularity?) → 2 (Yin / Yang ) → 4 (Four Symbols) → 8 (Trigrams) → 64 (Hexagrams). At its core, it's philosophical thinking — and personally, I believe there's great wisdom in it. For example, we should never be trapped by names and should always think beyond it.
(Shameless plug: I came to know about this about a year ago and still find it fascinating. I even built a site about all this — https://ichingdao.love)
Smells like numerology.
> Smells like numerology.
Kind of. And as a guy with a solid science background, I just don't buy into that kind of interpretation.
But if it is numerology, I believe I CHING divination is more like a commit-and-reveal scheme — you can't infer the future from the proof alone. You might only get to verify it once the future actually plays out. Kind of like a zero-knowledge proof — it gives you a proof/advice based on a possible future, but you gain nothing from it since the underlying computation is NP-hard. So better to treat it as a kind of thinking framework — like SWOT or scenario planning, but from a different cultural tradition.
"is always fascinating"
LLM spotted
^_& Good detective.
And without that comment, we wouldn't have talked this much. LLM is the friend.
I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
> There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what U+237C is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Paraphrased from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
That's become of the most memorable threads on Hacker News to me. I definitely think about it at least once most weeks.
Closure finally!
Well not really though. It still doesn't answer where the symbol came from; just where it was first catalogued.
Presumably its original use was in some yet-unfound paper or manual where they needed a symbol for azimuth.
what will i do... with all this extra time....
One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
> how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
IMO the biggest omission in Unicode are game controller button and keyboard emojis, as very frequently arise in game tutorials.
Most games aren't shipping with full-fat unicode support or typefaces that could display those icons, though. Plus it'd start to break down with controllers that aren't simple A/B/X/Y.
U+20E3 COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP
Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
Normally there's a single "font of last resort" that's used for particularly obscure characters. Although even those don't cover everything, the extended Egyptian hieroglyphs don't display for me, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_Extended-...
a single font can contain a maximum of about 65000 glyphs, but there are over 150000 defined Unicode glyphs, so a single font of last resort isn’t possible, unfortunately. Complete coverage would require multiple fonts.
I've never looked into this in detail before, you're right, it looks like android has over 100. Although composite font representation is supposed to fix this.
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
The other comment is correct, it was added as part of proposal adding a larger set of mathematical symbols[0]. The wikipedia page actually mentions the path through which it was added, which lets us make some educated guesses:
> From that apparent beginning, the Angzarr was swept up into the Monotype typeset catalog of arrow characters (...) It is unknown why Monotype added the character, or what purpose it was intended to serve
> In 1988, the International Organization for Standardization added the symbol to its Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) definition, apparently pulling it from the Monotype character set.
> In March 2000, the Angzarr symbol reached wide distribution when the Unicode Technical Committee, in collaboration with the STIX project, proposed adding it to ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard with which the Unicode Standard is synchronised. The Angzarr was proposed in the ISO working-group document Proposal for Encoding Additional Mathematical Symbols, although no specific purpose is listed for the symbol.
My guess is that the people proposing the addition of new maths symbols[1] weren't going to decide on inclusion or exclusion of a symbol on the basis of being familiar with it themselves or not, since that was likely true for many symbols that happened to only be used in fields of mathematics that they were not working in. Meaning they had to rely on some other kind of "authority" to infer that a symbol was used by the larger maths community. With that in mind "being part of the Monotype catalog and part of SGML" seems like a pretty sensible heuristic to go by.
Another consideration might have been that they simply wished to have complete coverage of the symbols that SGML encoded, regardless of familiarity with the symbols involved. And of course both could have been true.
[0] https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2191.pdf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angzarr
Seeing stuff like this, but knowing we can not get a unicode symbol for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourish_of_approval despite how ubiqitous it is in the Netherlands always frustrates me.
Perhaps we would have more of a chance if we make a collection of international differences in checkmark designs and propose that set of glyphs as a whole.
It doesn't seem like anybody ever filed the paperwork for it. (A search for "krul" on site:unicode.org doesn't turn up anything.) Unicode symbols don't just magically appear! Somebody has to do a bit of work to make it happen. If you're frustrated by a missing symbol, that somebody is probably you!
Maybe it was added as part of a larger set.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865
This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
Elevation -- the angle above the horizon -- is usually what's paired with azimuth.
Yes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself.
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.7...
Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.
“RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C
> it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian
Ah, of course :)
Honestly the little example of how a sextant works was more interesting to me.
The Fonts in Use page from Berthold is fascinating.
https://fontsinuse.com/foundry/159/berthold
I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
Let's hope fonts will start correcting it to the original form
The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
Those would be characters set with lead type. Most twentieth century designs would be created using a pantograph to engrave matrices for casting type although traditionally, a type designer would engrave punches which would be essentially the characters engraved at printing size, then struck into a blank matrix for casting the type.
Now can we find an example where this symbol was actually used in practice?
I didn't know that this is a mystery?
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
The typographic symbol was the element in question, not what "Azimuth" is.
Okay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?
Because that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
Maybe read the article next time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
> The article quotes the Didot system
Yeah but did any of the four previous articles say anything about it?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.
Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!
Check the photos in the article, specifically this one [1]
"Haussystem Didot", the title of the catalog, refers to a letter setting by the printing agency Didot, which is the one I linked on wikipedia.
The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.
I highly doubt that you eye scanned thousands of pages in French handwritten and mixed typesetted ... within less than a day. You definitely must be lying, they take months to read.
[1] https://ionathan.ch/assets/images/angzarr/Berthold%201900.jp...
> The Gallica scans are linked in the wikipedia article. Each of those chapters has hundreds of pages.
I went through a bit of it and saw no instance of the symbol. If it's in there, would you mind saying which chapter and which page? Or some hint about what context people could find it in? The maps I saw (maps were pretty easy to find, too, since most of the page numbers for them are "NP") didn't seem to use this symbol.
Neither did I read all these pages nor did I pretend to.
> Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages.
You have linked these two Wikipedia pages[1][2], implying that they confirm your extraordinary claims of how obvious and well-known this symbol is. I could in fact check within a single day that the symbol does not appear on any of the 15 images linked in these pages.
So unless you can produce evidence for your claim that "that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?", it is quite disingenuous to expect anyone to take it seriously. Expecting someone else to read "thousands of pages" to confirm or deny YOUR claim makes it even less worthy of consideration.
If you do have actual, material evidence for your claims, everyone in this thread would very much like to see it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
That's great and all, but the point is that there still isn't a single known (to the community of people trying to find the origins of that symbol, so, safe to say, the vast majority of people in general) appearance of the character in the actual text (i.e. used for its purpose), so if you have an example of a map/book/anything where this character was used, providing the link/scan/photo would be very appreciated.
The existence of characters that need this much work to explain suggests to be that unicode is bloated. Not the only thing that suggests that, either.
That’s unavoidable given the goal: Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
https://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example? Domino tiles? Alchemical symbols? A much smaller number of characters would have been sufficient for all but a tiny number of cases.
> What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example?
You may be too young to remember, but there was a time when a lot of software had their own way to encode emoji if they supported them. This sucked for interoperability - especially when using common protocols like SMS.
Some of these implementations were essentially find/replace and would turn various strings of characters commonly occurring in code into emoji. Someone reading your mail containing code on their portable device or other weird client would see parts of that code replaced by emoji. Maybe you had to format your code a certain way, inserting spaces tactically, to avoid accidentally ending up with an emoji. I'm glad we put that behind us for the most part.
Living in a world where you can just copy-paste some text containing emoji (or not) from one software into another is honestly great. Same for all these other symbols that may be embedded into text.
If a software has to come up with their own text-embeddable encodings to represent symbols (to allow for copy-paste or sharing) things often end up less than optimal.
I take "every character" to mean "anything that was represented in a reasonably common pre-unicode code page or character encoding, as well as anything that might come up in OCR output of text documents".
Emojis obviously got in from Japanese character encodings, and imho the world is off better for that. Though many of the extensions of the emoji set really don't seem to get what emojis are used for. Similarly, chess and shogi pieces as well as symbols from Western playing cards go in through previous encodings, and domino tiles got accepted based on being conceptually similar. A bit questionable imho.
On the other hand the Azimuth sign seems to satifsy the "would appear in OCR scans", based on being published in font catalogues. Even if nobody has come forward with a book it appears in, I don't think they made and advertised lead type characters for fun. It has to have had some use in printed publications of some type (probably scientific, from the surrounding context)
The stated goal of Unicode is to support every past and present writing system in world world. Say what you will about that but I think just because a symbol's meaning might be obscure to us doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.