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."
Why emoji? (Score:2, Insightful)
What's the point of adding pictographic symbols to Unicode? Is this really something we want frozen in time for eternity? What's the benefit of standardizing them anyway?
Wouldn't we be better off standardizing all characters used in written language and be done with it?
Re:Linear A? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a few, and researchers and historians would like to have them on computer.
Re:Why emoji? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Proprietary fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the years, I've tried to use Unicode for math symbols on various web pages and tend to revert back to GIFs or LaTeX-generating tools due to problems with symbols missing from the font used by this or that browser/OS combination, or even incorrect symbols in some cases.
IMO the biggest problem with Unicode is the lack of a public domain reference font. Instead, it is a mishmash of proprietary fonts each of which only partly implements the spec. Even the Unicode spec itself uses proprietary fonts from various sources and thus cannot be freely reproduced (it says so right in the spec), a terrible idea for a supposed "standard".
I'd love to see a plain, unadorned public-domain reference font that incorporates all defined characters - indeed, it would seem to me to be the responsibility of the Unicode Standard committee to provide such a font. Then others can use it as a basis for their own fancy proprietary font variations, and I would have a reliable font I could revert to when necessary.