Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of what you've said, I'm not sure I see a use-case for the distinction between Hyphen, Minus and Hyphen-Minus. Specifically, with having all three. If I were designing Unicode, I'd remove the Minus sign specifically. That way, if you absolutely need to e.g. use an old font that used long minuses (in old texts they could be even an em-dash), it would still be _encoded_ as the parseable expected by every software to date

View on HN

I would remove Hyphen-Minus, whose only reason for existence was that the mechanical typewriters saved a key by using the same character for both purposes.

Distinct hyphens and minuses are necessary both due to their different meanings and due to their different traditional appearance in any typeface that does not have fixed width.

At most the en dashes could be unified with minuses, because they normally have identical appearance, even if they have different meanings.

The minus symbol aligns with the + symbol and numbers, en- and em-dashes align with text (and there should be different forms for use with lowercase, and all caps settings).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com