Unicode 6.0.0

http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

by Uncle_Sam • 16 years ago

35 15 16 years ago

Jakob• 16 years ago

Oh no! Hundreds of smileys (emoji) in the character set. Usually I block the smiley-gifs with an ad-blocker. Need to look for a character-based blocker now.

wcoenen• 16 years ago

I don't think emoticons are a bad idea. I quite like the attidunal indicators (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less...) in lojban (http://www.lojban.org) also.

varaon• 16 years ago

This lets smileys be (more easily) understood by screen readers as well.

masklinn• 16 years ago

Why do you care for unmoving glyphs, do you also attempt to block Unicode smileys?

jws• 16 years ago

You can see them on the 2nd page of http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf

Rather more than I might ever need, but that comes with the territory of Unicode.

• 3 variations of cold sweat.

• 9 variations of cat faces, mercifully none of them include a LOL.

• The {see,hear,speak}-no-evil trilogy is represented.

• Weirdly, the iconic smiley face, two dots and an arc in a circle is not present. You have to pop over to 263A and get that one.

• To encourage adoption, I will start using 1F645 in real life to indicate NO GOOD, though no one will understand why I impersonate a walrus.

Sadly, there is HAPPY PERSON RAISING ONE HAND and PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION, but without both a left and a right one hand or a pair of leaning two hands we can't make the emiticons sway back and forth to music. Oh well, unicode 7.0. (And I think PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION looks like he is the victim of a stick-up.)

Handy Link: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ wherein George Douros gives you free use of his many fonts of obscure unicode symbols, but he hasn't drawn the Unicode 7 ones.

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

There is also a new “miscellaneous symbols and pictographs” block, including a lot of user interface icon type symbols: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F300.pdf

And new “transport and map symbols”: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F680.pdf

astrange• 16 years ago

> 9 variations of cat faces, mercifully none of them include a LOL.

That would require standardizing the Impact font.

bhiggins2• 16 years ago

No copyleft symbol, no public domain symbol (although this was just announced). Too bad! Glad to see that roasted sweet potatoes made the cut though...

joelhaasnoot• 16 years ago

This is done by a committee... Takes quite a while for stuff to be added. Languages in developing countries lobbying for their symbols to be added / formalized have to wait ;)

bhiggins2• 16 years ago

That's understandable. I'm sure the bulk of the work goes toward the new language characters. I just wonder who lobbied for roasted sweet potatoes...

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

The Bamum* supplement section sure has a lot of cool glyphs

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-16800.pdf

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamum_language

yxhuvud• 16 years ago

"222 additional CJK Unified Ideographs in common use in China, Taiwan, and Japan"

Enough to make the japanese stop not wanting to use unicode to represent their language?

klodolph• 16 years ago

As I understand it (and I know almost nothing about Japan), the problem wasn't with the number of characters in the CJK set, the problem was with CJK unification itself. If a Japanese reader goes through the list of CJK characters, what they'll see is a bunch of Chinese characters that happen to usually have almost the same shapes as Japanese characters. Apparently, some characters (relatively obscure ones used for names) are still missing.

At the time, the majority opinion at Unicode was "that's just a font problem" but you see, it was people from Europe who were pushing for CJK unification in the first place. However, there are some characters in CJK whose standard glyphs are so different from the Japanese kanji that they are unrecognizable to native readers. Language experts would look at both glyphs and say they are the same character, but most people are not experts.

The lesson learned (since this is HN): If you are writing an internationalized application, make sure you use the right font for Japanese users and the right font for Chinese users.

And this is one more reason why internationalization is hard, and just using UTF-8/16/32 strings is not good enough.

tumult• 16 years ago

Looks like Apple's emoji, which they added as a Unicode font in iOS to avoid implementing an extra layer of software just for emoji (relying on the telco to translate the codes sent via text/email from non-iOS devices) made the cut. Might soon be the death of the proprietary emoji text stuff in Japanese phones. It should be in Android soon, if it isn't already.

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

the new official Indian currency symbol: the Indian Rupee Sign

Ah yes.. in Gnome/GTK type "ctrl shift u 20b9"

The latest release of the Unicode Standard also includes support for the ancient Indian Brahmi script that was in use during the reign of Emperor Ashoka.

That's circa 232BC - of course a lot of buddhist (read - Chinese, Japanese, etc.) scripts originate from Brahmi, which was arguably used as a medium of religious evangelization to spread Buddhism from India. But I guess the language is effectively a dead language.

Unicode 6.0.0

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