<story><title>How I added 6 characters to Unicode (and you can too)</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-half-star.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>1wd</author><text>The rationale given for including mirrored half-stars as separate codepoints is right-to-left languages. I wondered why this was needed, since Unicode already has the a right-to-left mark (RLM)[1].&lt;p&gt;I found the answer in a comment on &amp;quot;Explain XKCD&amp;quot;.[2] The RLM usually only reorders characters, but does not mirror their glyphs. The exception are glyphs with the &amp;quot;Bidi_Mirrored=Yes&amp;quot; property, which are mapped to a mirrored codepoint.[3]&lt;p&gt;The half-stars proposal includes a note on that property: &amp;quot;Existing stars are in the “Other Neutrals” class, so half stars should probably use the ON bidirectional class. The half stars have the obvious mirrored counterparts, so  they can be Bidi mirrored. However, similar characters such as 
LEFT HALF BLACK CIRCLE are not marked as mirrored. I&amp;#x27;ll leave it up to the Unicode experts to determine if Bidi Mirrored would be appropriate or not.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Right-to-left_mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Right-to-left_mark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.explainxkcd.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;1137:_RTL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.explainxkcd.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;1137:_RTL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.unicode.org&amp;#x2F;Public&amp;#x2F;UNIDATA&amp;#x2F;BidiMirroring.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.unicode.org&amp;#x2F;Public&amp;#x2F;UNIDATA&amp;#x2F;BidiMirroring.txt&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How I added 6 characters to Unicode (and you can too)</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-half-star.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>treve</author><text>The one I&amp;#x27;m surprised about is not the stars, but actually the bitcoin character. It&amp;#x27;s just a form of branding to me, and while I think there&amp;#x27;s interesting uses for blockchain technology, public interest seems to be a bit inflated. Plus that blockchain tech will likely outlive bitcoin itself.</text></comment>