Unicode 6.0.0

I don't think emoticons are a bad idea. I quite like the attidunal indicators (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less...) in lojban (http://www.lojban.org) also.

Why do you care for unmoving glyphs, do you also attempt to block Unicode smileys?

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.

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.

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 ;)