Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Rebecca Bettencourt]

The Sharp MZ-700, a Japanese 8-bit microcomputer, has a set of electronic
schematic symbols, and they will be included in Unicode 16.0.

[image: Screenshot from 2024-08-13 13-43-58.png]

The rationale for including these though is that of compatibility, and not
because of any determination that schematic symbols qualify for encoding in
Unicode.

I was part of the group who proposed these symbols. I vaguely recall when
we were discussing these particular symbols that there was some verbiage
about Unicode encoding text and "notational systems," and one of us brought
up that it could be argued that schematic symbols are a "notational
system." However, this was a very minor theoretical point; no one has
attempted such an argument and that was not the argument we were making. As
far as this goes in practice "notational systems" seems limited to things
like phonetic transcription, chess notation, sheet music, and other things
that are at least vaguely text-like, as opposed to a fully two-dimensional
diagram like an electronic schematic.

-- Rebecca Bettencourt


On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 1:20 PM Martin Vahi via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> 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.
>
> Even ASCII had special characters for drawing the DOS era windows in
> console, so 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.
>
> 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
>
>
> Thank You for reading my letter and
> thank You for the answer(s).
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Martin.Vahi at softf1.com
>
>
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