It appears to me that adding too many symbols contradicts the goal of convenience, because the search time in the list increases.
For instance, the box drawing symbols are not that needed for postings.
I use them
sometimes. Especially for text diagrams in the programming sub-forum, they can be pretty useful.
That said, I simply added the set I myself might use. Exactly which ones of them are useful, is definitely up to discussion; I might also have left out some that others find useful –– all Unicode emoticons included in Verdana (default theme font here) for example.
For example, we could argue that
equation stuff is better expressed in MathJax, possibly excepting ≠ ≃ ≝ ≟ ≤ ≥, which are useful in text too. Similarly, although superscripts come quite handy, subscripts are rarely needed and for those, MathJax is typically better.
Then again, not everything has to be in a single panel. I, for example, would love to put the animated emoticons behind a similar pop-up button, so they wouldn't annoy me all the time.
As it is right now, anyone can use
it right now, either opening it directly or saving it on their local machine, and keep open in a different window or tab, for pasting the glyphs to posts. If you save it on your local machine, you can edit it –– just make sure your text editor uses UTF-8 –– and remove and add the glyphs you think you need, plus adjust its look to suit your tastes. It's all in a single file which does not need a network connection to work: it is a HTML tool page.
Since I registered only recently, I would like to know if it is actually beneficial to work this out? We can discuss this forever without effect, it only matters if Dave or one of the administrators picks it up.
It depends if a suitable
SimpleMachines mod exists or not. Dave has installed useful mods before. The SimpleMachines version used on this forum is shown at the very bottom of every page, and is 2.0.19 right now.
My core suggestion is to replace the always-visible Smiley buttons with one or more buttons that bring up panes of Smiley buttons.
One would be the current default set, one could be Greek characters, one could be the most commonly used Unicode glyphs, and so on.
That would require a new SimpleMachines mod, however.
There exists a
Tabbed smileys mod, that sounds like it would work for this, though.
With that, Dave/Gnif/etc. would need to create a new
Smiley Set, where the inserted text is simply the Unicode character. In a Smiley form, each glyph will need a corresponding image icon (GIF seems most common, but I really prefer SVG for these for maximum quality). For best visibility in all themes, they should have either a light background fill or a light halo around the black glyph. I can generate these in SVG, optimized PNG, and/or optimized GIF, trivially, using the glyphs in the official Verdana font (preferred font in the default theme) or DejaVu Sans or Monaco or Lucida Console or Courier New (preferred monospace font for teletype and code blocks in default theme). Scripting in Linux for the win. 😄 (= U+1F604,
😄.)
For example, right now the Omega smiley generates
\$\Omega\$, which is silly. It should generate
Ω instead, corresponding to U+03A9 = Ω.
The
minimum set of Unicode glyphs I'd like to see would be
Ω μ ° ± · × ≤ ≥ ≠ ∂ ∆ ϵ
and the set of Greek letters
λ τ ω φ ϕ θ β
The first four are obvious, very often used in normal discussions. (In fact, even MathJax recommends using the unicode degrees glyph instead of various
^o or
^\circ constructions.) Middle dot · and times × are useful even in text, because one can write e.g. "2.5 m·s⁻¹ × 3.2 s"; and necessary if you describe a vector algebra operation, for example triple product a·b×c = a×b·c.
(The way "micro" (one millionth) SI prefix µ is often written as 'u', does bug me a little. I do it myself, even; even though my keyboard happily produces it if I press AltGr + M. Those without an AltGr key, it is the right-side Alt key, used to produce various character variants. For example, AltGr + E produces € for me. It depends on what keyboard layout you use, of course; I use Finnish.)
I often use ≤ and ≥ and ≠, but most end up writing them here in their C form,
<=,
>=, and
!=.
∂ is the partial differential, ∆ is the Laplace operator and refers to increment (or "delta"), and ϵ is (lunate) epsilon most often referring to "so small that it is practically indistinguishable from zero". Currently, in text, the first two are written as 'd', and the last as 'eps', which is confusing.
For example, when I discuss the rate of change in x as a function of time, it would be easy to write it as ∂x/∂t; a change in x as ∆x, and an insignificant difference to x as x±ϵ.
I personally often use the floor and ceiling characters, which I omitted, because I haven't seen others use them much. Rounding x is properly written as ⌈x⌋, rounding x towards positive infinity AKA ceiling as ⌈x⌉, and rounding x towards negative infinity AKA floor as ⌊x⌋. When I remember, I write these instead as round(x), ceil(x), floor(x), for clarity.
Of the greek letters, I commonly use λ for length/wavelength, τ for time, ω for angular velocity, and φ ϕ θ β for angles. I'd guess that ∡φ would be pretty darn clear "shorthand" for "angle phi". I use a few others in quantum physics, but such topics are rare here.
The wider question is, do others agree with my assumption/opinion that these would make posts more readable?
Or are they just 'elitist jargon', something we are simply
used to because of our background education where they are commonly used?
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