😀 I just found an inofficial #Debian emoji: 🍥 Do other distro logos have also something like an emoji counterpart?

"Fish Cake with Swirl" - a slice of Japanese narutomaki, a ridged fishcake of processed whitefish with an iconic pink swirl, often served in ramen or oden. The swirl direction and size is not established and varies across icon sets.
#Unicode #utf8 #gnu_linux

Speaking of First World problems, it is absurd and shameful that there exists a 🚳 "no bicycles" emoji but no 🚫 🚗 "no cars" emoji.

#unicode #emoji #FuckCars

NVDA 2024.3 Beta 2 is now available for testing!

Changes introduced in Beta 2:
- Fix for reading messages in Windows Mail
- Added International Phonetic Alphabet braille table
- Bug fix for audio output on a mono audio device
- Bug fixes for Unicode normalization
- Updates to translations

Read the full change log and download the Beta from: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3b…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #Beta #PreRelease #FOSS #ScreenReader #NewVersion #New #News #Update #Unicode #IPA #Translation

NVDA 2024.3beta2 available for testing

Beta2 of NVDA 2024.3 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome yo…

^{NV Access}

Internationalise The Fediverse
shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/inter…

We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere.

It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use English letters at all!!!

A decade ago, I was miffed that GitHub only supported some ASCII characters in its project names. There's no technical reason why your repo can't be called "ഹലോ വേൾഡ്".

Similarly, I'm frustrated that Mastodon (the largest ActivityPub service) doesn't allow Unicode usernames and has resisted efforts to change.

So I built a small ActivityPub server which publishes content from an Actor called @你好@i18n.viii.fi - it is only a demo account, but it works!

Some ActivityPub clients report that they are able to follow it and receive messages from it. Others - like Mastodon - simply can't see anything from it. Take a look at the replies on Mastodon to see which services work. You can also see some of its posts on the Fediverse.

What Does The Fox Spec Say?

The ActivityPub specification says:

Building an international base of users is important in a federated network.
Internationalization

I can't find anything in the specifications which limits what languages a username can be written in. But there are a few clues scattered about.

The user's @ name is defined by preferredUsername which is:

A short username which may be used to refer to the actor, with no uniqueness guarantees.
4.1 Actor objects

There's nothing in there about what scripts it can contain. However, later on, the spec says:

Properties containing natural language values, such as name, preferredUsername, or summary, make use of natural language support defined in ActivityStreams.
4. Actors

So it is expected that a preferred username could be written in multiple scripts. Which implies that the default need not be limited to A-Z0-9.

The ActivityStreams specification talks about language mapping.

Finally, the ActivityPub specification has some examples on non-Latin text in names.

So, I think that it is acceptable for usernames to be written in a variety of non-Latin scripts.

But What About...?

There are usually a few objections to "Unicode Everywhere" zealots like me. I'd like to forestall any arguments.

What about homograph attacks?

Well, what about them? ASCII has plenty of similar looking characters. I doubt most people would notice when a capital i is replaced by a lower L - and vice-versa. Similarly the kerning issue of an r and n looking like an m is well known. Are mixed language homographs more dangerous? I don't think so.

What if people make names that can't be typed?

Well, what if they do? Maybe not being found by people who can't type your language is a feature, not a bug. But, anyway, clients can let users search for other people, or copy and paste their names.

What about weird "Zalgo" text?

It is up to a client to decide how they want to render text input. The "problems" of strange Unicode combinations are well known. This is not a hard computer-science problem.

What about bi-directional text?

The spec makes clear this is allowed.

Do people even want a username in their own script?

I have no evidence for this. But I bet you'd get pretty frustrated if you had to switch keyboard just to type your own name, wouldn't you? In any case, why can't I have a username of @😉

What's Next?

If you build ActivityPub software, give some thought to the billions of people who don't have names which easily fit into ASCII.

If your software can see @你好@i18n.viii.fi and its posts, please let me know.

shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/inter…

#ActivityPub #fediverse #i18n #mastodon #unicode

I'd like to run an instance with non-ASCII usernames · Issue #8417 · mastodon/mastodon

Mastodon usernames are currently restricted to Latin characters. I'd like to have the option to run an instance which allows usernames like "莎士比亚". I'm not saying that it should be mandatory that e...

^GitHub

the most important part of #Unicode history is when a mouse fell out of a light fixture and got added to the count of members present at a Technical Committee meeting (9 Nov 2016)

unicode.org/L2/L2016/16325.htm…

I used to depend on the Web to look for UNICODE characters, but not anymore. Now I use my system:

1️⃣ Alt + F2

2️⃣ gnome-characters

3️⃣ Type "lock"

And that's it. Very nice.

Once they add support for searching in more languages other than English, it will be great.

#gnu #guix #gnome #unicode