User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/10

October 2019

Wednesday 30

Apostrophe

Changes from Unicode version 2.0 to 2.1 …
Significant clarifications or modifications to character semantics include the following:
Apostrophe. Because the character U+0027 APOSTROPHE is very ambiguous, the preferrred character for apostrophe was documented as either U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE or U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.[1]

It’s always bothered me that we don’t have a clear way to encode a semantic distinction between apostrophe and single-close-quote. Different glyphs would be great: straight only for apostrophe and raised comma only for quote. (Good luck trying to convince anybody else to adopt that convention.) But ASCII 27 has so many meanings, using it for just one of them seems fraught. Compare hyphen-minus, where we have explicit hyphen and minus as alternatives.

Now I learn that "modifier letter apostrophe" is actually meant to represent the punctuation mark and not some obscure diacritic? Le sigh. Wonder if that stance was reversed in later versions?

U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

Aside: hyphen-minus, hyphen‐hyphen, hyphen⁃bullet.

U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS, U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN, U+2043 ⁃ HYPHEN BULLET

Saturday 26

Tamil character encodings

Have been working on "Rupee", and was curious that some scripts have specific Unicode points for their rupee symbol whilst others don’t. That led me to pre-Unicode Indic encoding schemes.
We have articles for ISCII and TSCII, but I haven’t found anything for TAM and TAB.
Anandakrishnan, M. (2010-06-24). "Tamil computing: the present and the future". The Hindu. Promoting TIC-2010 conference, but also covers background of 1997 and 1999 conferences, formation of INFITT, mentions TAM and TAB, …
Kalyanasunderam, K. (2007). "Introduction to Tamil Information Technology" (PDF). INFITT. Retrieved 25 October 2019.. Wide ranging slide deck. Mentions multiple encoding schemes. Has code tables for TAM and TAB, but they are hard to read.
Chellappan, P. (2004-09-03). "Unicode Technical Note #17: TAB to Unicode conversion". Retrieved 25 October 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) PDF
Prakash, D. (1999-06-13). "G.O.Ms.17 … Standardisation of Tamil KeyBoard and Encoding of Tamil Glyphs …". Tamil Net. Government of Tamilnadu. Retrieved 25 October 2019. Annexures detail the Tamil99 keyboard and the TAM/TAB 8-bit character encodings.
- Font encoding character names TAB
Unicode charts: Tamil Tamil supplement
Unicode FAQs: Tamil Language and Script answers some of the criticisms.

Performance

Am having issues on both iPads. Is it some gadget or option I've enabled, or too-many-tabs syndrome, or a bad third-party site?

Sunday 13

It’s been a different kind of week; couple of days off work, jumping around various wiki-places but not taking notes. Kids go back to school on Tuesday.

Wikisource

Started reading and re-verifying the Preface to MacCauliffe's The Sikh Religion. Hope I’m not messing up too badly; it’s been a long time since I was last on WikiSource.

URAA and the shorter term

meta:United States non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term
commons:Commons:Licensing#Uruguay Round Agreements Act
wikisource:Help:Wikilivres. Unfortunately Wikilivres appears to be down.

Soft hyphens

Soft hyphen mentions that there are two conflicting semantics.

To do: read ref's 1–3.

Test.

Shys with ex plicit line -breaks in wiki text. (Inserts spaces because newlines are whitespace.)

Shys without explicit line-breaks in wikitext.

Shy be
fore BR. (As expected, nothing special happens here.)

PRE with ex-
plicit line-
-breaks.

Round-trip through VE: shys were preserved.

Clocks

Apple emoji keyboard: 🕘 (24 time variants), ⏱ ⏲ ⏰ 🕰 ⌛️ ⏳

Pictogram voting wait series
	Yel	Blu	Grn
Image
20px	C {{Await}}, takes a size param.	Reviewing request. {{Reviewing request}}
18px	Later, Pending {{Later}}, {{Tobedone}}
17px	Discussion ongoing... , Doing..., [[User:\|]] is doing... {{Discussing}}, {{Doing}}, {{Isdoing}}		Reviewing...
16px		Checking... {{Checking}}

Others
	Crystal	Gnome	Oval
Image
20px		Proposal on hold {{ProposalOnHold}}	Pending approval {{PendingRequest}}
16px	Started, In progress {{Started}}, {{Inprogress}}		{{Icon}} GAH, takes a size param.
15px			On hold, On hold until {{OnHold}}, {{OnHoldUntil}}

Emote

sMirC and other wp:emoticons

Saturday 5

TEEL paragraphs

Stumbled on Schaffer paragraph and then found we don't seem to have anything on the PEEL or TEEL paragraphs that are taught in Australian schools.

User:Pelagic/Incubator/Article idea – TEEL or PEEL (paragraph structure)

Friday 4

Phab items

Was searching for something in Phabricator, and along the way found these interesting.

T179356 Minerva should not alter or hide edit icons when not operating on mobile-formatted content. (Resolved Nov 2017)
T229440 [EPIC] Refactor icon sizing in MF/Minerva to achieve consistency.
T208102 Improve compatibility of desktop VisualEditor with desktop Minerva skin. (Resolved May 2019, MW 1.34)
T162503 VE in Timeless makes cactions non-responsive, trapping users forever. ("Cactions" means content actions, apparently.)
T124168 Show Navbox templates in mobile skins. (Interesting ideas here. Started 2016, no comments since Dec 2018.)
T174119 Fix several design features of WikiEditor and CodeEditor to match the general style, and T223155 WikiEditor uses Apex-like styling in Vector for the toolbar; change this to WikimediaUI-style. (OOUI, Apex-like, Wikimedia-UI, oh my!)

Whole-page editing in mobile view

Was going to create a Phab task, but there already are some:

Adding sections in mobile view

…

Other gripes

Mobile editor: page title / tab caption doesn't change to "Editing:…" Given how small the tabs are in Safari, this is a mixed blessing. Maybe it should just be "E:" or ">".