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Unicode Consortium Releases Unicode 8.0.0

Posted by timothy on from the hobo-symbols-and-the-black-tongue-of-mordor dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The newest version of the Unicode standard adds 7,716 new characters to the existing 21,499 – that's more than 35% growth! Most of them are Chinese, Japan and Korean ideographs, but among those changes Unicode adds support for new languages like Ik, used in Uganda.

1 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. CJK is Unicode's big failing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    CJK in Unicode really kills me. I once had to write an appointment that generated PDF documents with both Japanese and Chinese text. When you do this with, say, English and Russian, you just need to pick a font set that covers both alphabets and basta. Not Chinese/Japanese. There are a number of glyphs that share a common historic root in these languages, and the Unicode folks decided to consecrate this historical relationship by recycling the character codes between the languages. Yet, the glyphs are substantially different when rendered. So you don't know what the glyph really represents until you know what font set is being applied to the string.

    What I ended up doing was processing each character individually and using a "look around" algorithm that would try to find clues in the context as to what language the glyph was in and render it with the right font. It never worked very well, but it worked well enough that the client decided not to redactor the controller that was generating the mixed language strings.

    But I learned two valuable lessons that day: Unicode isn't that great after all and stay away from CJK contracts.