

Unicode 6.0.0 - Uncle_Sam
http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

======
tumult
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.

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jacobolus
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>

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Jakob
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.

~~~
jws
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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>

------
sandGorgon
_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.

------
yxhuvud
"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
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.

------
bhiggins
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
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 ;)

~~~
bhiggins
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...

