It's a very unusual "character" as it can sometimes be rendered very, very wide- the same width as maybe 20 or so "normal" characters. (whatever "normal" means. The more I learn about unicode...) The same width as if you had typed it out in a sentence.
It breaks a lot of UIs that use character count as a proxy for string width.
Given that writing systems we have today are pre-digital systems of marks made with the human body and tools, all encoding of text in our HCI is a simulation of writing. Simulations by nature cannot be 100% accurate. choices have to be made about what is represented and simulated. choices have to be made about what to leave out. Simulations are a form of communication, they put forward a perspective about what is the important part of what is being simulated.
Seeing a symbol like "﷽" really brought home for me some of the assumptions about writing that I take for granted, and are inherently "argued for" by the way text is handled in our digital systems.
nwallin|5 years ago
It breaks a lot of UIs that use character count as a proxy for string width.
totetsu|5 years ago
voxic11|5 years ago
lopmotr|5 years ago
cheez|5 years ago
gnulinux|5 years ago
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmala
Disclaimer: I'm not a Muslim, I don't know Arabic.
mmastrac|5 years ago
Also fun is ﷺ, (https://charbase.com/fdfa-unicode-arabic-ligature-sallallaho...) which has the longest unicode decomposition IIRC.
ctdonath|5 years ago
Fun fact: it’s a single Unicode character.