Comment by gumby

4 years ago

> Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes.

One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text. So these are the types of documents being referred to: academic papers.

Some fancy books have photographs of ancient writing; I’m not sure if Unicode tries to encode such sources and I pretty much doubt it (how would you even know what to call the symbols? You touch on this in your comment). However often they are attached to treatises that order the characters in some way (I.e. index an alphabet) in which case the first case above would apply.

In other words: thanks to some scholars who wrote down and ordered runic alphabets, you can now discuss runes with your friends and colleagues through email.

14 comments

gumby

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runarberg  4 years ago

This is interesting. I’m comparing this to how musical notation is encoded in unicode. I mean, there is a block dedicated to the symbols, so the symbols are encoded, but you can’t document music using only unicode. But musical documents are being composed and written all the time. To write music you need an additional software which arranges these symbols in a certain way so that they express the authors intention.

I guess math has a similar representation in unicode as well.

All that said, I think people use runes to express magic and spells (even to this day). I don’t think all the magical runes are expressed in unicode (and perhaps they shouldn’t). If you want to use a rune in that way, you might have to draw it out in SVG or something and then email it to your friends.

  • thaumasiotes  4 years ago

    > I guess math has a similar representation in unicode as well.

    It's an ongoing project. As you seem to have guessed, Unicode math symbols are just about as useless for representing math as Unicode music symbols are for representing music. Producing mathematical documents is done using dedicated software, generally LaTeX.

    (And what you get is a PDF, because, as I noted in another comment, PDFs already support every notation there is, was, or ever will be.)

    • NateEag  4 years ago

      > (And what you get is a PDF, because, as I noted in another comment, PDFs already support every notation there is, was, or ever will be.)

      I now have a perverse urge to invent a sculptural writing system just so I can break this completely reasonable claim.

thaumasiotes  4 years ago

> One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text.

That's a weird goal for Unicode to have. We've already accomplished that; a PDF file does the job better (note: PDF documents already support every character existing in the past, present, or future!) while being less complex.

  • gumby  4 years ago

    I don’t understand. If there is no computerized way to represent the script, all you can do would be to include photographs in your pdf. The point of computerization is not simply storage and retrieval (and retrieval is hard if you can’t represent the script) but automated processing, which is meaningless if you can’t represent any semantics).

    Separately, PDF felt like a step backwards on the day it was announced and sadly nothing since then has changed that.