Unicode 6.1 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The latest version of the Unicode standard (v. 6.1.0) was officially released January 31. The latest version includes 732 new characters, including seven brand new scripts. It also adds support for distinguishing emoji-style and text-style symbols and emoticons with variation selectors, updates to the line-breaking algorithm to more accurately reflect Japanese and Hebrew texts, and updates other algorithms and technical notes to reflect new characters and newly documented text behaviors."

Comments

Why Slashdot won't adopt it

[tepples]

Before anyone chimes in complaining that Slashdot doesn't even support an old version of Unicode, this is for several reasons. For one thing, there was once a fad of posting pornographic ASCII art on Slashdot, so it appears Slashdot disallows any character that would be more useful for glyph art than for English text. For another, there was once a fad of using bidirectionality override control characters for turning text backwards, which would break the layout and allow spoofing a comment's moderation score.

Re:Why Slashdot won't adopt it

[BetterThanCaesar]

Raise your hand if you couldn't code a parser that detects those characters and takes appropriate action, such as popping bidi characters.

I'd love to be able to write IPA when discussing pronunciation, or actually write out words in other languages, ohm character for discussing electronics, pound and yen signs for currency ... Hey, even a bigger whitelist than what we have now would be great!

Re:Stick to ASCII

[cc1984_]

Yeah but can you write a pile of poo in ASCII?

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm

Re:Zomg

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I believe you mean to say that lolcats are in ur standardz, occupyin ur code-points; but not necessarily prescribing ur particular choice of glyph...

Re:Checking for the release of a new version

[Canazza]

£ is Shift+3, what are you on about?

Re:The next version of the standard

[StuartHankins]

...filling pages with sexually explicit ASCII art, such as Goatse, male masturbation, and birds perched on a penis...

Yeah, the way they are going they might actually *have* these characters in the set now...

Tetris, Chess, Baseball, and gang symbols

[tepples]

all the Tetris pieces

The polyominoes up to five squares can be composed from U+2580 (upper half block), U+2584 (lower half block), and 2588 (full block) characters. Unicode tends not to introduce precomposed ligatures except when needed for round-tripping with pre-Unicode encodings.

glyphs of game pieces of all well known games

A lot of well-known pre-1923 tabletop games' game pieces already exist in Unicode. Chess is U+2654 through U+265F, and Checkers is U+26C0 through U+26C3. A lot of game pieces are simple enough in form that the Geometric Shapes (U+25A0 through U+25FF) represent them just fine. For example, Othello is U+25CB and U+25CF, as is Connect Four. Even the enemy in Fast Eddie for Atari 2600 is in Miscellaneous Technical (U+237E) as is home plate in Baseball (U+2302).

heck, instead of just the suit symbols why not 52 glyphs for a standard deck of cards

Those can already be composed from a Basic Latin letter or number and a suit symbol. Unicode tends not to introduce precomposed ligatures except when needed for round-tripping with pre-Unicode encodings.

throw the Major Arcana tarot cards in there too

I don't know about Tarot, but all twelve signs of the zodiac are in Miscellaneous Symbols, even the "69" looking sign of Cancer (U+264B).

gang symbols

The symbol of "Folk Nation" gangs is similar to that of Judaism: a Star of David (U+2721). The symbol of "People Nation" gangs is similar to that of Islam: a 5-point star and crescent (U+262A).

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[marcosdumay]

You know that this is the exact situation that Unicode AVOIDED, doesn't you?

Now we have one standard with 3 different representation. Those replaced literaly thousands of standards. Yep, sometimes doing that new standard works.