Unicode 7.0 Released, Supporting 23 New Scripts 108
An anonymous reader writes "The newest major version of the Unicode Standard was released today, adding 2,834 new characters, including two new currency symbols and 250 emoji. The inclusion of 23 new scripts is the largest addition of writing systems to Unicode since version 1.0 was published with Unicode's original 24 scripts. Among the new scripts are Linear A, Grantha, Siddham, Mende Kikakui, and the first shorthand encoded in Unicode, Duployan."
Re:Why emoji? (Score:4, Informative)
Not everyone speaks English or Chinese or Spanish.
Everyone recognizes stop sign, airport, pile of poop and other symbols. So communicating via pictographs is actually good. Even if it was incidental.
And many of them recognize this [emojipedia.org] as well.
Re:Peso vs. Dollar (Score:5, Informative)
Many of the stylistic duplicates, for example the half-width and full-width latin forms that you mentioned, are only in Unicode because of backwards compatibility with pre-Unicode character sets. If there hadn't been character sets that had different encodings for half- and full-width forms, Unicode never would have had them either. So you can't use them to argue for more glyph variations in Unicode. The same applies to many of the formatted numbers, such as the Unicode characters "VII" (U+2166), "7." (U+248E), "(7)" (U+247A), and "1/7" (U+2150), and units of measure ("cm^2", U+33A0).
(Oh, for Unicode support in Slashdot....)