Topic: Proposal to add Bitcoin symbol to Unicode - page 3. (Read 5559 times)

nice proposal 
if your proposal get approved
it will make a big help in bitcoin community..
i also like to have keyboard with BTC .. 

Can you imagine the credibility and bragging rights?

Headline:  "Every Computer In The World Now Has The Bitcoin Symbol"

OP - Just seen this thread. Awesome, this 100% needed doing, good luck with your proposal. I'm quite excited about this. Please keep us informed.

A fantastic idea and all the best of luck. Sorry I cannot help you with the process as it is all beyond me, however you have my support in your endeavour. 

You have done a great work for the Unicode BTC addition. I hope this time the proposal will pass because I find your documentation very thorough and accurate.

Previous page:

Good work OP. I've wondered about the process behind Unicode symbols before, seems like you only need to get your proposal right. I'm surprised they think there is ownership behind the Bitcoin symbol... But hey... Bitcoin be Bitcoin.what was the Unicode symbol that you successfully petitioned for before?

Yeah that's the best idea for big companies that will produce these keyboard something like this prototype:

Reading through the proposal again, it is clear that the Unicode people require a lot of detail.  Canonical Category, Bidi Mirroring.  You seem to know what you're doing.

I do see one thing that might be slightly improved, although it may not matter.  Where it says, "(Although
there are factions encouraging the use of alternative characters.)", it might raise the question of whether BTC is the right symbol to add.  Although you later explain why BTC is the necessary character, the previous sentence by itself does not make it clear that all alternative characters are insufficient as well as already existing in Unicode, and that the addition of BTC would eliminate the need for other characters. 

Maybe something like "(Although there are small factions who have given up on adding BTC to Unicode)" which is still accurate but more favorable.

Unicode is the standard that most computers use to define what text characters exist and how to encode them. In the bad days before Unicode (e.g. the 1990s), different computers used different characters and stored them different ways. If I used Russian and you used Japanese, we couldn't exchange files. But with Unicode, everyone's computer handles characters the same way. I can send you Ӂ ڠ ᅗ Æ א ₳ ☢ 五 and your computer can handle it (as long as you have the fonts installed).

The point is that computer companies aren't going to patch random characters into their OS. But if you get a character added to Unicode, then everyone will support it. The Unicode Committee has the people who decide what goes into Unicode. The purpose of my proposal is to convince them that putting the Bitcoin symbol into Unicode makes sense and isn't just some crazy idea I came up with.

(I've oversimplified somewhat but this is probably already more than you want to know about Unicode.)

Ken

good work! keep it up!

Nice proposal.

I've read that before, great article!

So why do we need the Unicode approval for this?

Cant we just create a patch for all OS's and include the BTC in it's alphabet? I dont understand why we need their permission to include it in the alphabet.

Can anybody enlighten me?

Lol. Yes, my previous Unicode proposal was for the group mark symbol used by IBM mainframes in the 1960s. It was approved, so that symbol will be in the next Unicode release. You may be interested in my related article on mining Bitcoin on a 1960s mainframe: http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old-ibm-1401.html


That explains things. For those just joining, my proposal to add the Bitcoin symbol is at http://righto.com/bitcoin-unicode.pdf and is much more extensive than the unrelated rejected 2011 proposal.

Ken

I can't tell you how many times I used to wish there was an IBM groupmark symbol.





Sorry, I didn't notice your actual proposal before.  I've read it now, you already have plenty of stuff.

My other confusion, and the reason I posted so much, is the guy who quoted the Unicode rejection letter from 2011 on page 1.  I didn't read it very carefully, and I thought it was an update saying that your proposal was just now rejected.  lol.

I've mostly been on the Reddit end of this discussion, may be good for reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3j0261/help_me_get_the_bitcoin_symbol_added_to_unicode/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3jmg9h/proposal_to_add_the_bitcoin_symbol_to_unicode_pdf/

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A lot of these steps would follow more naturally from the inclusion of a symbol in the Unicode specification.  I'm not sure keyboards would be a priority, though obviously there would be a market for keycaps  I think one of the first steps would be mostly to approach developers of popular online editors to include an option to insert the Bitcoin symbol (if not readily available through a generic 'insert special character').  The W3C should also be approached to add e.g. &bitcoin; or &btc; or &xbt; (depending on argument) as a parallel to the € HTML entity.  These are quite separate processes though

It's actually a lot easier to insert the symbol than many people think.  We've added it to the Bitcoin Wiki in the same manner as has been done on BitcoinTalk, for example.

I have added a section on inserting the Bitcoin symbol to the Bitcoin Wiki.  There's at least 3 approaches that are all reasonable to implement (if anybody knows of more, shoot me a PM or edit the Wiki directly; don't want to clutter up Ken's thread).  Some of it could even be automated with a script (run through document, search&replace "BTC" with the symbol).

Having it included in the Unicode specification does mean that all of these workarounds can, eventually (keep in mind that fonts will need updating), be dropped in favor of just inserting the symbol, fitting with surrounding text in every which way, which is much more desirable.

Hi runpaint. I already have some multi-lingual running text examples in the proposal, but you've found some new languages, so thanks for finding them. The Greek was is especially interesting - I had looked for one in Greek, but didn't find it. I'll add some of your examples to the document.

At this point, there are probably enough examples, so you don't need to spend more time looking.

Thanks again for your help,
Ken

I was just about to point out that one of those examples is in Dutch, which shows that Bitcoin isn't just a logo used by one group.  It's worldwide.

But when I came back to add that, I had a better idea to show the widespread usage of BTC in running text.  Again with links for easy reference:


Spanish:




Croatian:



German:



Greek:



Chinese:




Indonesian:

Perhaps he should put his bitcoin address up for donation, or create an account at https://www.changetip.com

If he suceeds he really deserves some donations.