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Comment by Shorel | Hacker News Reader

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Shorel

Cyrillic А is not the same as English A.

For example, some fonts render A in a way that looks like Cyrilic Л. (Like The Mandalorian title screen.)

This would be incorrect if using the same A for both: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V8fC7bdV-mI/maxresdefault.jpg

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I don't see anything special in the linked image. The As look as they would in Latin script.

(probably not what you meant, but just in case: the fourth letter is not a Cyrillic A but a D.)

I think the image is not meant to show the problem but show a case where if the Cyrillic A had been stylised the same way that the English A is in the English version, the two distinct letters would become indistinguishable such that the Cyrillic title would effectively read "The Mlndlloriln"

I see, for those out of the loop, the English title screen does not have the horizontal bar in the As.

I should have linked the English title as well, now I read my comment and see it is not sufficiently unambiguous.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mandalorian_logo.jpg you can see that the A letters are rendered the same as Cyrillic Л.

To further the confusion, in Buenos Aires there are many street signs that use Л as the letter A, and they use П as the letter N.

Part of the confusion was because I see the English title's As are actually Λ (capital Greek lambda), rather than Л (at least in the font that HN uses). I'm guessing from context that Л is sometimes rendered as Λ in some Cyrillic fonts.

> I'm guessing from context that Л is sometimes rendered as Λ in some Cyrillic fonts.

Exactly. It is more often rendered like that in Bulgaria. But it is still the letter Л.

Which just furthers the point that glyph rendering and character code points are very different problems and the multiple code points in Unicode are the right approach.

If the readers were to confuse A and Д, that's a problem with the font, not the letters. Cyrillic, Greek and Latin A are all one letter (in uppercase).

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