[runarberg]

Even if english speaking, it is still ambiguous. For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu) is easy to type (AltGr + M). I bet this is the same for the majority of HN users. The US keyboard doesn’t use third level shift (usually AltGr) so most people that use US keyboard exclusively are unaware of this. Whenever I see people using the Latin small letter U (u) instead of the micro sign, all I think about is how restrictive the US keyboard actually is, and how much of a shame it is that the culture which predominantly uses this restrictive keyboard design came to be the dominant when designing computer interfaces.

[jdrek1]

> For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu)

The greek letter mu IS the micro sign, where do you think it comes from?

[gourlaysama]

Unicode has both MICRO SIGN (U+00B5) and GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (U+03BC). The former is the one on (most) people's keyboard, and it shouldn't be used to type actual Greek.

[runarberg]

Look the same, but different code points.

MICRO SIGN (U+00B5)[1] vs. GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (U+03BC)[2]

1: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00b5/index.htm

2: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03bc/index.htm

[jdrek1]

My apologies, I did not know about that. Why would they deliberately put duplicates in unicode though?

[runarberg]

Some font-families might want these letters to look different for some reason. Even if they look the same perhaps the boldfaced or italics should behave differently, perhaps the spacing should be different etc.

I’m not a font designer but I can imagine that the micro sign often appears around Latin letters whereas the Greek letter mu doesn’t, so that font designers might space them differently for that reason.

For fun I compared 10µm (upper; using the micro sign) with 10μm (lower; using the greek letter mu) in the comic sans font face. https://imgur.com/qwnnAqD

[dwheeler]

> Why would they deliberately put duplicates in unicode though?

IIRC, to enable adoption. Many of the codepoints were adopted from other encoding systems, and it was often useful to support 2-way conversions without loss while Unicode was being adopted.

What's a "duplicate" is also sometimes in the eye of the beholder.