Mastodawn

Weird Unicode minutiae that is currently occupying space in my brain: why is ⸙ U+2E19 Palm Branch in the "Supplemental Punctuation" block?

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Justin Dolske Mar 19

@tedmielczarek Oooh, unicode archaeology! Added in Unicode 5.1, and I think this is the original proposal: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06269-add-roman.pdf

From the doc:

Roman inscriptions and coins from the imperial period make use of a palm branch character [...] Because the palm branch is used to separate words or sections of text, it should be regarded as a punctuation character rather than as a symbol. [...] It would logically be placed in the Supplementary Punctuation range.

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Ted Mielczarek Mar 19

@dolske huh, TIL! Can I ask how you found the proposal? I have spent a lot of time trawling through the Unicode site looking for these sorts of things in the past but have never figured out a straightforward way to go from "Added in Unicode X.Y" to "proposed here".

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Justin Dolske Mar 19

@tedmielczarek Same. In this case I got lucky and a web search somehow got me to https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n3211.pdf which literally has a note in the margin referring to the proposal. But it has usually meant slogging through their email list archives and document registry, and hoping to find enough public context to track things. It's fun, but YMMV. 😂

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Dan 🌈Mar 20

@dolske
I have not thought about it until this instant, but I would have assumed that a straightforward site with every Unicode symbol and its meta data* world exist, no? Seems like the sort of thing the internet nerd hive mind would have done basically from day one.

* Links to RFCs, cross referenced variations, origin stories, etc
@tedmielczarek

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Ted Mielczarek

@phrawzty @dolske there are a number of sites like that, and while the Unicode data files include much of that info they don't include this, so it would have to be manually curated. Unicode has…a lot of code points.