Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.
Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#12I wonder what fringe diversity group has gotten their new custom emojis accepted this time. Does Unicode care about actual languages any more?
The whole emoticon thing have became ridiculous. It's time for Unicode to split and let the kids playing with their images and to focus on more important, textual things. For example the cuneiform block is not detailed enough to be used by scholars.
In what way is the Cuneiform block insufficiently detailed?
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole emoticon thing have became ridiculous. It's time for Unicode to split and let the kids playing with their images and to focus on more important, textual things. For example the cuneiform block is not detailed enough to be used by scholars.
Do you think that the committee approving new emojis is qualified to seamlessly transition into discussing the minutiae of cuneiform formatting? It may be a guess on my part, but I'm pretty confident that there are two different (and probably non-overlapping) sets of people working on these two areas.
Perhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier characters.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#14It is a shame that the majority of these won't been seen by common devices. Google has stopped work on their Noto fonts initiative, and modern versions of Android are stuck with pre Unicode 10. Apple has been pretty good at adding Emoji on iOS, but macOS seems to be left behind. As for Linux... Installing the Unifont gives coverage, but most distros don't seem to have a way to update base level fonts. I'd love to be…
Emoji handling on Linux is so upsetting. It should not be this tricky.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#15I wonder what fringe diversity group has gotten their new custom emojis accepted this time. Does Unicode care about actual languages any more?
Well, as the linked post says in the first paragraph, almost 90% of the 554 new characters aren’t emoji, and include four new scripts (used by several different languages) and additions for several other scripts. Emoji are only mentioned once in the first half of the article, and unless you consider accessibility-related emoji to be only for a “fringe diversity group”, I’m not sure how the newly added emoji [0] could…
And only 14 of the new emoji are related to accessibility, of which 6 are gender-specific.
The rest is stuff like garlic and yo-yo. I mean think of yo-yoers what you will but I don't think they're a fringe diversity group :p.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#16Are the more fancy scripts supported by Unicode used by real people in production? By scholars? With special fonts? Or is it more like Unicode just wanting to support everything, even though the target audience is actually using something else?
Asking because I'm impressed by the aim of the whole Unicode project but having no real experience with it beyond the basics.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#17Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.
If only they hadn't tried to cut it down to 16 bits near the start, we could have avoided a lot of the partial support that emojis expose.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#18Are the more fancy scripts supported by Unicode used by real people in production? By scholars? With special fonts? Or is it more like Unicode just wanting to support everything, even though the target audience is actually using something else? Asking because I'm impressed by the aim of the whole Unicode project but having no real experience with it beyond the basics.
Mostly scholars. But even if nobody at all would be using it currently, the explicit goal of Unicode is to support all scripts. Unicode is meant to make all other text encodings obsolete so the world never has to think about text encodings again (which mostly worked so far). That goal can only be reached/maintained if every script anyone might plausibly want to use is contained in Unicode.
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think that the committee approving new emojis is qualified to seamlessly transition into discussing the minutiae of cuneiform formatting? It may be a guess on my part, but I'm pretty confident that there are two different (and probably non-overlapping) sets of people working on these two areas.
Perhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier characters.
Hmm, they did include that block for encoding arbitrary bitmap images. (U+2800)
Re: Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
#20Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.
Not just Unicode, but Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
At the very least it is a pleasant unintended consequence. A decade ago support for characters outside of the BMP was hairy (certainly possibly though in PDF's with LaTeX via XeLaTeX), and something you would use if you dabbled in the obscure glyphs contained in it; now it is standard.