Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[Andre Schappo via Unicode]

> On 16 Jan 2019, at 09:30, James Kass via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I wrote,
> 
> > The VS possibility would double the character count of any strings
> > including them.
> 
> A kind list member has pointed out privately that the above is mistaken.  Twitter character counts aren't actually character counts.  Each math-alpha counts as two characters as do the VS characters.  So a string with VS characters interspersed would actually be triple rather than double.

Odd! I have just briefly experimented with twitter and it appears that any character ≥ U+1100 has a count of 2 and any character < U+1100 has a count of 1.

I remember many years ago twitter was incorrectly counting in UTF-16 encoding units thus giving a count of 1 for BMP characters and a count of 2 for astral characters. That problem was fixed long ago.

André Schappo

> (I've also been advised that a lot of the math-alpha on Twitter involves fraktur, script, and double struck characters.  As was pointed out to me, that practice would probably continue even if Twitter enabled italic and bold styling as a feature.  Again, I do not personally know how widespread the practice is.)
>