Parker Higgins writes about Unicode quirks, crossword tools, public-domain images, and press and technology policy.
HN links his Prince symbol Unicode post to explain how to approximate the glyph, and his fruit-image FOIA work when those watercolors come up.
> Sorry, but how can you not have a name? Good luck getting an ID document without a name. That doesn't make sense.
That's what 32-36 are referring to, cases where children aren't given a name for an extended period of time. Even without extreme cases. what about a Hospital system meant to be used to track newborn children? It's necessarily not going to be able to rely on a name, because it's not uncommon for children not to be named for a few days. A system such as that might want to track the children by the mother, date of birth, and birth ordering (in case of twins, triplets, etc).
> This just sounds dumb: Unicode has thousands upon thousands of characters. Only with Chinese can I see this possibly being a problem, but even here I thought Unicode did account for that. Unicode was designed to have every conceivable glyph that every language on Earth uses.
Just because it was designed to accommodate every conceivable symbol, doesn't mean it currently has every conceivable symbol. What about the symbol Prince used for his name[1]? What about a language that's not in Unicode yet?
> There really isn't that much to it: you need to have two strings (and one can be null as I said above)
If someone has a single name, does it go in the first name, or second name spot? Is this enforced, and where?
It's not that you won't generally be served well by your suggestions, it's just that the problem space is complex enough that it's worth thinking about a little before falling…
Fun to see this up here! I played a role in getting these high resolution images put online, through some FOIA work and public advocacy: https://parkerhiggins.net/2015/04/us-government-release-7584-fruit-pictures/
I also uploaded the collection to Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:USDA_Pomological_Watercolors
And for several years have run a Twitter bot that posts one image every few hours: https://twitter.com/pomological/
The Artist Formerly And Then Again Known As Prince had his own single-character font just for rendering His Symbol, and his PR company send around copies of a floppy disk with Windows and Mac versions of the font, along with these instructions for writing about him:
https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html
http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.html
https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/
Not exactly, but you can combine unicode glyphs for a simulacrum: Ƭ̵̬̊
For an explaination, see https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/
Prince's love symbol: https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/
Ƭ̵̬̊
http://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/