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Unicode 7.0 Released, Supporting 23 New Scripts
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."
Still no Klingon?
There are a few, and researchers and historians would like to have them on computer.
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.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The larger Unicode becomes, the more fragmented the implementations will be.
Maybe instead of fragmented, you mean there won't be font sets that can't render all of unicode's characters?
*shrug* Even if that were a problem, the underlying data is intact and undamaged and will be viewable once a suitable font library is obtained.
The more fragmented it is, the more errors and incompatibilities will compound. It will get less and less useful, and more and more bulky, and will eventually be as useful as Flash. (well, it may not be that bad, but still, Flash was all things to all people, and almost universally installed, until it wasn't.
Can you give me an example of an incompatibility? I'm not saying there are none, just that I don't know of anything and that, in general, I've been very pleased with Unicode's stability - compared to other encodings - for doing data exchange.
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....)
But they're not "standard" even if Unicode claims they are.
They are standard in reference to Unicode because the Unicode Consortium defines the Unicode standard. Someone has to be the first to define the standard.
but there is not central body that dictates exactly what they look like, so that pile of poop symbol will vary depending upon which texting app you use it with
Yes, those are called fonts, and in case you haven't noticed, that was true before digital computers with silicon microprocessors even existed and has been true for thousands of years.
The apps that use emojis are not coordinating with any standard's body or ensuring that the intended meaning is preserved.
Apple does, hence why the Messages app already matches the new code points. Google Hangouts seems to work fine as well. Both Messages and Hangouts convert even things like :) into the proper unicode code point and use standard fonts for display. Sure, some half assed apps may not work correctly, but anyone that supports unicode and has fonts will receive them properly already.
Emoji is somewhat silly, but its hardly new, just go ask Japan. Just because you're new to the ballgame doesn't mean its a new ballgame.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.