Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, Martin, and welcome to Unicode:

On 2024-08-13 13:04, Martin Vahi via Unicode wrote:
>
> Dear readers of this list,
>
> I know that there is literally a shit emoji character, but when I tried
> to find characters for electronic components like diodes, capacitors,
> resistors, radio lamps, etc. then I failed to find any. The same with
> XOR gate, OR gate, AND gate, MUX, DEMUX, etc. …a wish for some
> characters that at least in some combined
> manner would allow to draw electrical schematics in console windows
> does not look too extreme to me. Some reference to some mail archive,
> where that topic has been discussed in the past, would be helpful.

I am not aware of a discussion of encoding symbols for electrical 
schematics in Unicode. I am however aware of numerous proposals to 
encode various graphical symbols in general in Unicode. Those proposals, 
and the arguments against them, are so common that there are sections of 
The Unicode Standard and of the Emoji process which describe what gets 
encoded and what does not.

Consider (re-)reading the following:

  * The Core Specification of The Unicode Standard, section 2.2 Unicode
    Design Principles
    <https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch02.pdf>. Consider
    especially the principles "Plain text" and "Characters, not glyphs".
  * Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals, especiall the
    "Selection Factors" section
    <https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors>

Some questions I would ask of anyone proposing to encode electrical 
symbols in Unicode:

Are these symbols used in a plain text context?   Do people want to 
write in an email, <MUX> <NAND> <Resister 10k Ohm> <Capacitor 10picoFarad>?

Do you have evidence of people using such symbols in text outside of 
computer-based plain text?  For instance, do you have examples of people 
hand-writing text with electrical symbols mingled in the text?

Do you have evidence of people trying to draw electrical schematics in 
console windows?  Why are those people trying to use text drawing 
mechanisms instead of graphics mechanisms like SVG?

Overall, my reponse to

> …a wish for some characters that at least in some combined
> manner would allow to draw electrical schematics in console windows
> does not look too extreme to me.…
is that it does look quite extreme to me.  Electrical schematics are a 
two-dimensional graphical representation of an electrical circuit. The 
right tool for the job is graphics, not text, it seems to me.

Also, in the context of discussions about Unicode, certain words are 
terms of art and their meanings matter. So,

> Even ASCII had special characters for drawing the DOS era windows in
> console….

The word "ASCII" refers to a particular character encoding standard 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII>, aka ANSI_X3.4-1968, aka 
ISO_646.irv:1991. It has just 128 code points. I am not aware of any 
which are for drawing DOS era windows.

Maybe you are referring to IBM Code page 437 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437>, the character set of the 
original IBM PC. It included ASCII plus a set of line-drawing symbols 
and some icons.

When talking about Unicode proposals, getting the terminology right for 
other encoding standards reduces confusion and speeds up the discussion.

> As a side-note, some modern era Linux terminals allow to display
> graphics, even videos, in pixel analogues called sixels.
> I even have a YouTube demo video about that:
>
>     ("2022 06 17 images and videos on WSL Linux Terminal", 2023_03_08)
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBLSa7X8dEY

I have not watched this video all the way through. But the Wikipedia 
article on Sixel <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel> seems to say that 
sixels are an encoding of image data, in 6-bit units, as ASCII 
characters. Terminals which display sixel-encoded image data switch into 
a "sixel mode", in which they interpret the data stream as an image 
rather than as text. I see no intention that the images represented as 
sixels be legible together with, and mixed together with, text content. 
Thus sixel encoding seems to be a higher-level protocol which 
re-purposes text data channels to transmit graphical content, and not a 
form of text content.


> Thank You for reading my letter and
> thank You for the answer(s).
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Martin.Vahi at softf1.com

Is this the sort of answer you were looking for?

Best regards,

     —Jim DeLaHunt

-- 
.   --Jim DeLaHunt,jdlh at jdlh.com      http://blog.jdlh.com/  (http://jdlh.com/)
       multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20240813/015bc18e/attachment.htm>