My ideal wallpaper

March 20, 2005 3:03 PM

What does all of Unicode look like? At once, as a poster? Ian Albert decided to find out... No full image of the whole thing, sadly (but understandably, given its 22,017x42,807 resolution).
posted by wanderingmind (26 comments total)

Wow.
posted by bigtimes at 3:18 PM on March 20, 2005

What's your favourite character? I like 0F12.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:26 PM on March 20, 2005

That rules.

Allthough the cool way to do it would have been to generate them based on a unicode font....
posted by delmoi at 3:36 PM on March 20, 2005

And how come there's a Hammer and Sickle but no Nazi swastika? That's prejudice.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:37 PM on March 20, 2005

Pretty_Generic : " And how come there's a Hammer and Sickle but no Nazi swastika? That's prejudice."

It's either U+534D or U+5350 (can never remember which direction is good and which is evil). Chinese character, so therefore probably not technically a Nazi swastika, but from a functionalist standpoint, I believe they're the same.
posted by Bugbread at 3:44 PM on March 20, 2005

Now someone just needs to etch it into stone, burry it somewhere deep inside the earth for a few thousand years...
posted by hypnorich at 3:47 PM on March 20, 2005

Hooray!

(clockwise is bad.)
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:48 PM on March 20, 2005

?
?^????

?
?^!?

?
^??^?

fin
posted by nmiell at 3:51 PM on March 20, 2005

Bloody hell, my three act play in which snowman encounters difficulties and ultimately prevails against adversity is ruined.

It worked in the preview.
posted by nmiell at 3:54 PM on March 20, 2005

I want this poster. I don't care if it's bigger than my apartment.
posted by Simon! at 4:04 PM on March 20, 2005

Chinese character, so therefore probably not technically a Nazi swastika, but from a functionalist standpoint, I believe they're the same.

If it's the Chinese (Mandarin?) character I'm thinking of, the cross is actually 'twisted' in the opposite direction of a swastika.
posted by bingo at 4:12 PM on March 20, 2005

It worked in the preview.

Yeah it's a common metafilter bug, discussed here, you can get around it by inputting the characters as hexadecimal character entities (本 for 本) and you should copy your text before you hit preview because previewing takes out all the formatting.
posted by bobo123 at 4:19 PM on March 20, 2005

bingo : " If it's the Chinese (Mandarin?) character I'm thinking of, the cross is actually 'twisted' in the opposite direction of a swastika."

There's both characters (left twist and right twist) in the Chinese character set, hence the two Unicode codes. Japanese only has the non-swastika one.
posted by Bugbread at 4:23 PM on March 20, 2005

Ian Albert, what an unfortunate name.
posted by Josh Zhixel at 5:03 PM on March 20, 2005

(Getting way off topic)

Every Chinese dictionary I have only lists the 'clockwise' one, not the Nazi one. I can testify that it has a totally different impact in China. Most people associate it with Buddhism first, rather than WWII Germany. I once saw a guy get a huge swastika (the clockwise one) tattoo on his chest. I just hope he never goes shirtless in a bar in the West.
posted by sudasana at 5:32 PM on March 20, 2005

The Bookshelf Symbol 7 font had a swastika (not the reversed one) in it before it was removed with a Critical Update.
posted by daninnj at 5:44 PM on March 20, 2005

This is very cool, we should fire this poster into space!
posted by tiamat at 6:59 PM on March 20, 2005

Gorgeous! But somebody needs to learn how to use mpage.
posted by undecided at 7:46 PM on March 20, 2005

...recursively.
posted by undecided at 7:55 PM on March 20, 2005

It worked in the preview.

Solution:
1. Click preview before typing
2. Type your message
3. Preview it
4. Press the back button
5. Click Post
posted by cillit bang at 8:00 PM on March 20, 2005

I'd like to reiterate bigtime's comment (i.e. "Wow"), and also ask if anyone knows what funky language, or character set, or whatever it is, contains the characters from the "sample row" image on the site. It looks like some mixture of electrical symbols, set theory operators and road sign mating calls. Now that's a language I wouldn't mind learning....
posted by JHarris at 9:49 PM on March 20, 2005

That's the Yi syllabary, JHarris - the Yi are a minority group in southwestern China (extending into Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, according to the notes in my copy of the Unicode Standard). And I agree, it's got to be one of the coolest-looking writing systems ever. It was, according to the book, introduced in the 1970s, which accounts for its modern look.
posted by wanderingmind at 10:14 PM on March 20, 2005

...Double-checking that, I need to correct myself. It was standardized in the 70s, but examples of it have been around since the 17th century or so, so nobody really knows where it came from. Here's the Omniglot page on it. The t, p, and x on the end of some of the syllables aren't pronounced; they're tone markers (t=high tone, p=low tone, x=middle-high tone, unmarked=middle-low tone).
posted by wanderingmind at 10:17 PM on March 20, 2005

Thanks for the Omniglot link, wanderingmind. That's a neat site!
posted by joe lisboa at 10:53 PM on March 20, 2005

The Poster of Babel.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 11:09 AM on March 21, 2005

Thanks for the info wanderingmind, now all I need to do is get to work on a zany web meme utilizing these symbols!

DrJohnEvans: Nice reference, though the Library of Babel makes my brain hurt enough as it is with "only" every possible permutation of 25 characters. The Unicode version would probably undergo gravitational collapse.
posted by JHarris at 12:35 AM on March 22, 2005