Unicode - going down the rabbit hole
summary
Covers why text breaks: mojibake examples like O’Neill from wrong encodings, a live homoglyph demo (Cyrillic “Apple”), and the limits of Han unification. Describes building an OS that boots on Raspberry Pi and prints accented names, joining SG16 to push char8_t/u8string into the standard, finding ~700 uses of u8 literals in a huge codebase, and recommending Harfbuzz+FreeType for shaping/rendering and UTF‑8 everywhere with normalization at program boundaries.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:51Learning German
- 2:16Yak shaving
- 3:35Miniature train
- 4:37Working on a large legacy code base
- 6:44Copperspice
- 7:13C++ Standardisation
- 10:53Chinese (Hanzi)
- 16:27Ligatures
- 18:02Japanese (Hiragana)
- 27:21Windows 1252
- 34:10What is a character
- 35:29Wingdings
- 38:41Unicode abuse
- 42:38Encoding unicode
- 52:12Displaying unicode
