Arrow dingbats

[Michel Suignard]

So it sounds like 27a1 came first. Then 2b05 etc was added to complete the set with 27a1, except that it didn’t complete the set because nobody aligned the glyphs.  Then they added U+2B95 in a 2nd attempt to complete the set? (Why not just fix the old arrow?)

Except that nobody seems to have U+2B95 aligned either. On unicode-table.com<http://unicode-table.com> it looks totally different, and Mac doesn’t even have it. Is there any hope this will actually fix it? Has the unicode consortium made it clear to one and all that U+2B95 is supposed to align?


Wingdings added way more arrows, check the 1F800-1F8FF Supplemental Arrows-C. In the process, many unification happened along existing arrows, resulting among other addition of 2B95 and re-use in the context of Wingdings of many already encoded characters. I have written various documents when working on the Wingdings that were posted on the UTC web site that explains the rationale in more details. Obviously when working with a posteriori unification, sometimes we have to adjust slightly the glyphs in the charts to make the set consistent. For example, we may use Wingdings glyphs in some characters that were encoded before we added Wingdings. If you look at the chart page for the block 2B00-2BFF it is totally obvious how the set in 2B05-2B0D and 2B95 go together and there are x references in the name list to make that explicit.

Glyph consistency is something I take very seriously when creating charts because so many look at the chart glyphs as the reference and given the various sources it is not a simple matter. I use a complex mix of fonts to get where we are now. By no mean Unicode-table.com represents a reference for these matters.

How they get implemented in various platforms and fonts is beyond my control, but at least I work on having a decent reference in the official Unicode pdf charts (and 10646).

Michel

From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Chris
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2015 2:08 PM
To: Unicode Discussion
Subject: Re: Arrow dingbats


So it sounds like 27a1 came first. Then 2b05 etc was added to complete the set with 27a1, except that it didn’t complete the set because nobody aligned the glyphs.  Then they added U+2B95 in a 2nd attempt to complete the set? (Why not just fix the old arrow?)

Except that nobody seems to have U+2B95 aligned either. On unicode-table.com<http://unicode-table.com> it looks totally different, and Mac doesn’t even have it. Is there any hope this will actually fix it? Has the unicode consortium made it clear to one and all that U+2B95 is supposed to align?



On 29 May 2015, at 5:13 am, Andrew West <andrewcwest at gmail.com<mailto:andrewcwest at gmail.com>> wrote:

On 28 May 2015 at 05:48, Chris <idou747 at gmail.com<mailto:idou747 at gmail.com>> wrote:


Unicode has the arrow dingbats in the range 2b05 with names like “LEFTWARDS BLACK ARROW"
conspicuously missing is the right arrow

But everywhere I can see that has this arrow, it looks a lot different to
the other arrows with a narrower body and head.

Whose fault is this,

The three left/up/downwards black arrows were added at the request of
North Korea, so I guess you can blame Kim Jong-Il for the missing
rightwards arrow ... perhaps the North Korean army never went to the
right.


and who will fix it?

It was fixed in Unicode 7.0 last year with the addition of U+2B95
RIGHTWARDS BLACK ARROW.  Of course, it may not be fixed for you and
other users unless you have a font installed that supports all the
arrows in a consistent style.

I don't know why the character was added in 7.0, but it may have been
prompted by the same question as yours that was asked on this list in
2013 <http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2013-m10/0078.html>.

Andrew

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