Have Characters that Depict Electronic Components been Discussed?

[Charlotte Eiffel Lilith Buff]

I feel like these examples are less “valid” use cases for plain text and
more the result of technical limitations that stopped being relevant long
ago. Characters like the block elements or box drawing parts, or even
simple “hacks” like building a progress bar out of common punctuation
marks, exist not because text-based pseudo-graphics were a good idea, but
because developers at the time had no other choice but to use them if they
wanted to achieve certain effects. They *would* have used actual graphics
if they had been able to, in which case the concept of abusing text
characters to imitate primitive graphics (and wasting precious character
slots that could have been assigned to actual letters from actual languages
instead) would have seemed ludicrous to them.

Unicode acts as a time capsule for this era of computing as an inevitable
consequence of its goal to be the universal, all-encompassing character
set, but a time capsule is just that: a way to remember the past. Adding
new pseudo-graphics with no history behind them to Unicode isn’t so much
future-proofing as it is stubbornly clinging to days long gone. We no
longer live in a world where on-screen text has to be divided into
fixed-width cells of a handful of pixels each, or where text characters
have to be defined solely based on their precise shape on a particular
display device without any underlying semantics, or where the act of
drawing a single image to the screen takes up so much memory and processing
power that you have to “write” your graphics instead if you want to do
anything more complex than a shopping list – and we should be thankful for
that.

Retro computing is cool and all, but I wouldn’t want to buy a PC with
floppy disk drives nowadays.

Am Mi., 14. Aug. 2024 um 21:40 Uhr schrieb Martin Vahi via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org>:

>
> Thank You all for the answers, useful references and interesting
> history, but while reading Your nice answers that seem to revolve around
> the idea that Unicode is meant to be a standard for only a kind of
> 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%|
>
> or even a "teletype compatible" progress bar analogue like
>
>      0%
>      1%
>      2%
>      3%
>      4%
>      5%
>      (and so on till 100%)
>
> Aren't such use cases LEGAL USE CASES for text in computers?
>
> I know that I sound a bit like a troll by asking such questions, but
> really, if text is being used for a lot of novel "hacks" like the ASCII
> 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
> if there are already so many characters defined in Unicode? With
> such solution there might not be a need for many new characters in
> the future, because they might be drawn as combination of existing
> characters.
>
> 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
> rendered on top of a letter. What's the harm to the Unicode standard by
> defining such special characters? It would also solve the issue with
> font files, because a set of installed font files will never be able
> to contain fonts for absolutely all modern Unicode code points without
> being constantly updated, but fonts for those 128 characters could be
> installed once and then a "legacy computer" that has fonts for those 128
> characters can still draw/render "email from the future" with "future
> characters" if the future email standard says that a sending email
> client can embed font file analogues for those "future characters" in
> the form of strings that consist of some combination of those 128 2D
> drawing characters? It's a 2D hack, but it can make plain text based
> software more future-proof and ideologically the 2D drawing characters
> are at the same category with the interactive text console progress bar:
> not usable in paper books and probably hard to pronounce in any human
> language.
>
> Thank You for Your answers and thank You for reading my letter(s).
>
> Sincerely Yours,
> Martin.Vahi at softf1.com
>
>
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