Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2024-08-14, Martin Vahi via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
> text that people once wrote on paper, not for "2D drawing hacks" like
> ASCII art and diagrams, I devilishly stumbled upon the idea that plain
> text in computers has always been used for more than just classical
> literature. An example that nobody reads as written form of a human
> language, is an interactive progress bar that consists of dots like
>
>      |0%........         100%|

That is a use of *existing* plain text to approximate the desired
graphical impression.

> art and progress bar in computers and it would be quite cheap from spent
> code points amount point of view to define some small set of special
> characters for doing almost arbitrary 2D drawing, then what's the harm
> of defining that small set of such "sprite role" characters, specially

Unicode does not encode what *might* be used, it encodes what *has*
been used.

> For example, if a monospace character area is divided to 16 pixel
> rows and 8 pixel columns and each character of that drawing character
> set fills exactly one of those pixels, then there would be exactly
> 16*8=128 such one pixel depicting characters. Those 128 characters
> could be visually used on top of each other just like accents are

You are William Overington and I claim my five pounds ... (British
cultural reference, google Lobby Lud).