Your Keyboard Cannot Comprehend These Noodles

How did it take 50 years to be able to type this character: 𰻞(𰻝)? Biang Biang Noodles are one of the staples of Shaanxi in central China. They are world famous for their name, written in 58 strokes, being one of the most complex Chinese characters. But computers weren’t always up to the task of typing Chinese. In the early encoding schemes of China, Japan, and Korea only a few thousand characters were supported. While this was enough for daily communication, it wouldn’t be until Unicode and the process of Han Unification that these separate character encodings would become compatible. Today’s Unicode supports 149,813 characters in several different Unicode blocks and spanning several planes. The Biang character, both the traditional and simplified version were added to Unicode 13.0 in 2020 at code point U-30EDE and U-30EDD respectively. While it took nearly 50 years from the advent of the personal computer to when we were finally able to type these characters, hopefully it will take less time for other variant characters to be supported in the Unicode Standard. Early CJK encoding tables: ~yasuoka/ Unicode chronology Unicode first press release Unicode standard principles: Unification of Han Characters: Requirements of proposal form: Unicode 1.0 chart: Ideographic Research Group: ~irg/ Writing Biang Biang: Relevant Papers: “■”字文化解析 “biáng”字的文化解读 他 山之石 ，可 以攻玉 Biang就一个字 再说biangbiang面 retro computer by Blake Stevenson from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)