[adverbly]

That is so stupid.

Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large).

Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power.

The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

[TehCorwiz]

Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old?

Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.

So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

[palmotea]

> So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation.

> Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line)

In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.

[card_zero]

I don't even know how to make that factoid work. It must require that the bar on an f is separate and removable, so that an f can be used as long s.

[ratelimitsteve]

>The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.

[rcxdude]

There's far more niche things in unicode, and I don't really see that much point getting angry over them.

[adverbly]

I'm sorry but someone has to stand up for simplicity and to stop garbage from making its way into open public standards.

The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame.

I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception for this or are there other characters that are that wide?

[rcxdude]

I don't think they're adding these things for fame, I gotta say. And yeah, unicode characters can be pretty large. Again, this is isn't even the tip of the iceberg of unicode complexity or weirdness.

[orimirs]

Check this out 𒐫

[moregrist]

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.

This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.

It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:

> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.

[0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

[adverbly]

> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

That's not what I said or what I intended to imply.

I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected.

The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.

How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about.

Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?

[moregrist]

> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.

Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode trying to capture existing behavior, even if rare. And I think it's important to err on the side of capturing what people did, even if it's from an bygone era.

> How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

It's definitely more than 10. But even if it's 10, I disagree with your assessment. People used this; it's worth a codepoint. There are far stranger code points out there.

And I've seen far weirder things in open standards. Have you read the C99 standard? Are you aware of the three allowed integer representations? Of which maybe two were in use in 1999, and one only in use in relic hardware that might exist in maybe tens of sites.

[ratelimitsteve]

>I would assume almost nobody encounters

That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.

[adverbly]

That analogy is not accurate.

To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.

[Timwi]

I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/

[bee_rider]

Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway).

For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text.

Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.

[moregrist]

> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out

As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied.

> I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant?

Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite.

You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into.

The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again.

While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.

[bee_rider]

I do have a PhD, and I have crawled up the trees of citations on occasion. But they were not so huge that I needed to manage them actively. But it was STEM, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more complex bibliographies exist elsewhere.

[patcon]

Thank you :)

[adregan]

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash.

EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)

[eddyg]

How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52

I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.

[DonHopkins]

I do miss the old PHP manuals on Hurricaine Electric with the comment sections where anyone could discuss every function, ask stupid questions, and post totally bogus answers, which everyone would then believe without skepticism, then copy and paste into their code in production.

It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations.

There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.

[yreg]

Would like to see how this looked handwritten.