> Invisible operators are explained in Section 22.6, Invisible Mathematical Operators.
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> Invisible operators are explained in Section 22.6, Invisible Mathematical Operators.
Just when you think Unicode can't get any weirder than all the dizzying variation of human language it's just been describing, suddenly yes hello have you heard about invisible math
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I don't know what they are, for the record. They're in chapter 22, and I'm still on chapter 6, the idiot's introduction to writing systems. I've got a lot more light fantastic to cover before I'm ready for invisible math.
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Really my favorite bit of reading the Unicode spec is that it keeps doing stuff that makes me go "oh come on SURELY nobody needs that" and then immediately goes on to explain how a language that I speak and write fluently uses this all the time, actually.
Latest example: a non-breaking space is like a space, but does not permit line breaking to occur on it. So far so good. But then there is also a narrow non-breaking space, which is the same but narrower.
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Turns out, the narrow non-breaking space is used in French typography. It's the amount of space around punctuation, and must indeed be a space, narrow, and non-breakable to correctly convey correctly typed French.
TIL
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Chinese typography needs a very long dash to represent a jump between trains of thought. In western centric typesetting this was implemented with two em-dashes back to back, but that led to typesetting problems.
That's how we got U+2E3A TWO-EM DASH, which is what it says on the tin.
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@danderson U+00AD soft hyphen FTW.
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@robpike Reading the spec, I do sometimes wonder if there's a secret game going on to encode a character that is an exception to every rule or non-normative regular pattern, as a form of greasing/anti-ossification.
"Oh dear, all the characters with 'HYPHEN' in their name behave similarly, someone might depend on that. Quick, add a hyphen-like character that doesn't have 'HYPHEN' in its name, and a character that does have 'HYPHEN' but behaves completely differently!"
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@danderson There are hundreds of them!
https://invisible-characters.com -
@robpike I'm sure the Unicode consortium would never, they're serious people doing a serious job. And besides, humanity's made enough of a pig's breakfast of things that there's probably no need to go out of their way to find exceptions.
But the deeper I get into the spec, the more the intrusive thought crops up.
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@stilescrisis I'm very disappointed that the page I loaded wasn't (apparently) completely empty
Neat reference, thank you!
