For no easily explicable reason, there are over a dozen alternate “alphabets” defined in the Unicode standard. Some of these aren’t actually intended as alphabets (for example, one of the characters in one of these is actually intended to be the Planck constant), but somehow they got put into the standard anyway. Here are several of them (note that there are no font tags for the text below):
The existence of a couple of these alphabets is actually explicable - the last one, for example, is used in Japanese text when Western script gets mixed in, making it blend in better (many, though not all, fonts display these characters with the same width as normal Japanese script, making them read more elegantly). But I can’t begin to explain why there are two complete blackletter or double-struck scripts.
Anyway, as you may have noted, I’m using blackletter script in my custom user title right now to make fun of the tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon. There’s a converter here which includes several alphabets and pseudo-alphabets (note that not all of them are complete, or at least don’t display correctly with the character sets I currently have installed on my computer; also note that most of these characters don’t display correctly in Android, at least not by default).
I’m curious why these characters were included in the Unicode standard, but mostly I’m amused that they exist.
One last set of characters appears to be intended for numbered lists, but again, I’m not sure why this was simpler than simply typing out “1.”, “2.”, etc.
⒈⒉⒊⒋⒌⒍⒎⒏⒐⒑⒒⒓⒔⒕⒖⒗⒘⒙⒚⒛
Finally, the forum admins should perhaps be aware that using “quick edit” on several of these character sets breaks them. I don’t know why; vBulletin is probably poorly coded. It still works better here than it does at my forum, where using these scripts at all simply truncates a message (probably because I actually have my database set encoded as UTF-8, iirc, and vBulletin must not know how to handle this correctly).
e: I wanted to try using Drumpf quotes in Zalgo text, but this doesn’t seem to work with whatever character settings the forum has. Using the results for “I HAVE A WINNING TEMPERAMENT” results in this (spoiler tagged because it stretches the table):
e2: Actually, Zalgo text seems to work fine on Windows. Mac OS X doesn’t like it, at least with Firefox. I have no explanation for why this happens.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Unicode separates the intended purpose of a symbol from its visual appearance. In some cases a number of different purposes might be represented by a symbol that is visually the same. I'm guessing a number of these are intended for use as mathematical symbols rather than letters of the alphabet.
Finally, the forum admins should perhaps be aware that using “quick edit” on several of these character sets breaks them. I don’t know why; vBulletin is probably poorly coded.
We may take that as a given. They will of course claim that newer versions (which we can't upgrade to without great effort, cost, risk and who knows what else) are better, but I'm convinced they are still poorly coded.
Having done some further research on this, fragment appears to be right; most of these are apparently intended for use as mathematical symbols. I can sort of see the reasoning; italic and/or bold letters can be used as symbols for specific variables with separate meanings from those that aren’t italic and/or bold, and keeping the meaning straight is important. I can even see how blackletter, script, and double-strike are important. I do not understand the reasoning behind having separate alphabets for serif italic, serif bold, serif bold-italic, sans-serif roman, sans-serif italic, sans-serif bold, and sans-serif bold-italic, but not serif roman. Surely a large portion of webpages on the Intertubes are rendered in sans-serif fonts, and having separate serif symbols presumably makes no less sense than having separate sans-serif ones.
Anyway, this is the code block a lot of these symbols appear in, in case anyone else was curious and wanted to do further research.
Regarding vBulletin: vBulletin 3 is fairly poorly coded, yes. It doesn’t come close to being as poorly coded as vBulletin 4 was, at least the last time I tested it out. Here’s a nice summation of the amount of thought that went into it: The programmers decided that changing every separate setting in a style sheet should require a separate screen. There are literally hundreds of variables in a style. That was the point where I determined that I would not be using vBulletin 4. I don’t know if vBulletin 5 is better, or if they got their act together later and fixed the vB4 style; I haven’t looked into the latter for long enough to find out, and I’ve never had access to the admin control panel of the former.
Because this message doesn’t seem “fun” enough, here’s the full version of the quote that inspired my user title in a number of different alphabets and pseudo-alphabets:
.ᴎiw oT woH woᴎk I .TᴎɘmAᴙɘqmɘT gᴎiᴎᴎiw A ɘvAH I .TᴎɘmAᴙɘqmɘT Ym ꙅi ,ᴙAꟻ Yd ɘdYAm ,TɘꙅꙅA TꙅɘgᴎoᴙTꙅ Ym kᴎiHT I .ᴙɘTꟻA og ꙅ'Tɘl ,TᴎɘmAᴙɘqmɘT ,Ho - mooᴙ A oTᴎi ɘUᴎɘvA ᴎoꙅibAM Tɘg YɘHT ,woᴎk UoY ,gᴎiꙅiTᴙɘvbA ᴎA ᴎo ꙅᴙAllob ꟻo ꙅᴎoillim ꟻo ꙅbɘᴙbᴎUH Tᴎɘqꙅ ɘHꙄ .UoY llɘT ɘm Tɘl ,Tᴎɘqꙅ ɘHꙄ ...ᴙɘTTɘd HↄUm A ɘvAH I ⸮woᴎk UoY ,ꙅAH ɘHꙅ ᴎAHT TᴎɘmAᴙɘqmɘT ᴙɘTTɘd HↄUm A ɘvAH oꙅlA I .TAHT TUodA ᴎoiTꙅɘUp oᴎ ꙅ'ɘᴙɘHT ⁏ꙅɘob ɘHꙅ ᴎAHT TᴎɘmɘgbUj ᴙɘTTɘd ɘvAH I
I apparently need to install some more character sets for some of these to display in their entirety.
e: Several of these scripts also do not work with Quick Reply.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
If you ever tried to write internationalized software prior to Unicode you would think Unicode to be the very model of a modern character set. But as others have pointed out, you have to think of the subsets of characters culturally, not symbolically. Because that is how the transition was made from the chaos that existed prior to Unicode to today. In a given culture a given symbol can have a different use than the same symbol in another culture. So it gets a different code because its cultural context is different, but it's not symbolically different. There may be a temptation to try to regularize the symbol against the code but it takes a lot of cultural specific knowledge across many cultures to pull it off and it's easier to just give the same symbol as used in the different culture a different code.
Prior to Unicode a given culture would have their own encoding for the same character set often varying across manufacturer, for example ascii vs ebcdic for the English character set. The Japanese code sets where crazy, with not only a different set per manufacturer, but often several different sets within a given manufacturer. Add to that, the very different nature of many Asian character sets vs. western sets and life was crazy for a programmer trying to write code to deal with data sets that could come from anywhere.
For no easily explicable reason, there are over a dozen alternate “alphabets” defined in the Unicode standard. Some of these aren’t actually intended as alphabets (for example, one of the characters in one of these is actually intended to be the Planck constant), but somehow they got put into the standard anyway. Here are several of them (note that there are no font tags for the text below):
The existence of a couple of these alphabets is actually explicable - the last one, for example, is used in Japanese text when Western script gets mixed in, making it blend in better (many, though not all, fonts display these characters with the same width as normal Japanese script, making them read more elegantly). But I can’t begin to explain why there are two complete blackletter or double-struck scripts.
Anyway, as you may have noted, I’m using blackletter script in my custom user title right now to make fun of the tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon. There’s a converter here which includes several alphabets and pseudo-alphabets (note that not all of them are complete, or at least don’t display correctly with the character sets I currently have installed on my computer; also note that most of these characters don’t display correctly in Android, at least not by default).
I’m curious why these characters were included in the Unicode standard, but mostly I’m amused that they exist.
One last set of characters appears to be intended for numbered lists, but again, I’m not sure why this was simpler than simply typing out “1.”, “2.”, etc.
⒈⒉⒊⒋⒌⒍⒎⒏⒐⒑⒒⒓⒔⒕⒖⒗⒘⒙⒚⒛
Finally, the forum admins should perhaps be aware that using “quick edit” on several of these character sets breaks them. I don’t know why; vBulletin is probably poorly coded. It still works better here than it does at my forum, where using these scripts at all simply truncates a message (probably because I actually have my database set encoded as UTF-8, iirc, and vBulletin must not know how to handle this correctly).
e: I wanted to try using Drumpf quotes in Zalgo text, but this doesn’t seem to work with whatever character settings the forum has. Using the results for “I HAVE A WINNING TEMPERAMENT” results in this (spoiler tagged because it stretches the table):
e2: Actually, Zalgo text seems to work fine on Windows. Mac OS X doesn’t like it, at least with Firefox. I have no explanation for why this happens.
What I see here are some of the fonts used in printing, and there are many more than just a few dozen, and more are being added all the time. One of my favorites is "Brush" and I am still using it for my cards, along with several other fonts. FYI, this forum only uses 21 that are listed.
__________________ The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. Wayne Dyer
Unicode is weird
Linear Mode
