Emoji

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William
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

Some readers might like to know of the following post in the Unicode mail list archive.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0064.html

It is entitled "Emoji: Public Review December 2008".

There are already two posts Re: that topic in the Unicode mail list archive.

The entrance to the archive is on the following page.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/

There are some interesting links in the first post mentioned above.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html

The contents of that document may change with time.

http://groups.google.com/group/emoji4unicode

That link opens onto an archive of posts about the proposal.

In the http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html document as it stands as I write this post, I did notice one item straightaway.

About a fifth of the way down is an item labelled as YEOMAN OF THE GUARD with the note • Beefeater, British below it. Yet the illustration is of a Guardsman of a Foot Guard regiment, not of a Yeoman of the Guard, which is a different group.

The Yeomen of the Guard wear Tudor-style uniforms, with a flat hat. They are typically shown on the television at the State Opening of Parliament in England. They are not the same group as the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London. Readers who know of the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera named Yeoman of the Guard may also know that that name is in that Opera being wrongly applied to the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London.

There are pictures on the following page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeomen_of_the_Guard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeomen_Warders

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_Guards

William Overington

19 December 2008
William
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

Regarding the http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html document and the request for comments.

Pineapple

I wonder whether it would be better if in the submission to the Unicode Technical Committee the glyph for the pineapple were to show an upright pineapple?

I wonder whether a note saying Symbol of welcome should be added?

Many years ago I saw two stone pineapple ornaments, one on each of two stone pillars at the entrance gate of an English country house. The pillars and pineapples looked very old. The pineapples were upright.

I wondered why a pineapple was on each of the pillars.

Years later I learned that a pineapple was regarded as a sign of welcome.

Noticing the pineapple amongst the emoji I remembered this and and indeed found a note about it in the following web page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple

In some cultures, the pineapple has become associated with the notion of welcome[14], an association bespoken by the use of pineapple motifs as carved decorations in woodworking.
The link [14] from the wikipedia page is to the following page.

http://www.mindspring.com/~sixcatpack/pineappl.htm

Searching on the web for stone carving pineapple welcome I found the following.

http://www2.weymouth.ac.uk/stonemasonry ... _sites.php

That page provides a link to the following page.

http://www.dawsoncolvert.com/

Within the PORTFOLIO section of the webspace there is a thumbnail of a pineapple: upon it being clicked a larger display is produced in the middle of the page.

http://www.dawsoncolvert.com/portfolio.html

Within the PRESS section of the webspace I found the following.

http://www.dawsoncolvert.com/pressgraph ... techo2.pdf

That stone pineapple has no leaves at the top, though those on the pillars of the country house which I saw many years ago did have leaves.

William Overington

24 December 2008
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

At the http://groups.google.com/group/emoji4unicode web page, as of the time of writing this post, the most recent thread is entitled "Comparison of emoji and emoticons".

http://groups.google.com/group/emoji4un ... 5a8d716690

The thread contains a link to the following document.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/223919/emoticons.pdf

The pdf is ten pages, of which pages 2 to 10 can be displayed well by using, within Adobe Reader, View | Rotate View | Clockwise.

William Overington

29 December 2008
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

Some readers might like to know that there is a font available which has some emoji mapped into plane 15 of Unicode, which is one of the Private Use Area planes.

The mappings are from the following source.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html

The font started as a learning experience of adding glyphs into a high plane.

At the time of writing this post there are only two emoji in the font, namely U+FE008 NIGHT WITH STARS and U+FE00D RAINBOW.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2530

William Overington

2 January 2009
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Re: Emoji

Post by Erwin Denissen »

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Re: Emoji

Post by erotsppa »

Can anyone please tell me how to make a font that can display iPhone emojis? I have all the emojis images, just have no idea how to make computer fonts out of images!

The images can be found in this zip file
http://www.modmyi.com/forums/file-mods/ ... ed-dl.html
They are all 32x32 png files!
William
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

I have noticed that on the http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html web page, which at the time of writing of this post states that it was last updated on 12 February 2009 17:12:55, that there is reference to the Emoji having been accepted into the pipeline.
1F300..1F545 582 Miscellaneous Pictographic Symbols [Emoji] (Miscellaneous Pictographic Symbols block: 1F300..1F5FF) 2009-Feb-06 Accepted N/A
1F600..1F641 66 Emoji Compatibility Symbols (Emoji Compatibility Symbols block: 1F600..1F64F) 2009-Feb-06 Accepted N/A
Earlier on the web page is the following.
Caution: use of proposed or accepted characters is at implementers' own risk; the composition and allocation of the characters may change before they are adopted in the Unicode Standard.
The only listing of which I am currently aware is at the following page, which is dated 2009-Feb-06.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html

For other submissions about other non-Emoji characters previously there has usually (always?) been a pdf document available. Does anyone know if there is a pdf for the Emoji submission please?

I got the above link from the http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0063.html web page.

William Overington

18 February 2009
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Re: Emoji

Post by vanisaac »

I was at the last Unicode Technical Committee meeting, and the Emoji were discussed at length. Specifically, the discussion centered on finalizing the character repertoire, which characters should be placed in pre-existing blocks, and the demonstrative glyph forms for presentation and balloting at the Tokyo WG2 (ISO 10646) meeting next month. Currently, Unicode 5.2 is in beta and should be fully released quite soon, and it does not include the Emoji. Pending WG2 approval, they are scheduled for Unicode 6.0, beta next spring, full release in about a year. Once the WG2 has met, you will probably be able to get the preliminary allocation from the Unicode Consortium or Michael Everson. I can personally attest to everyone here that actual thought and debate - I kid you not - has gone into whether the example glyph for an Emoji camel should be dromedary or bactrian, whether a bookmark should have tassels, and whether a horse should be standing or running. The discussions lasted longer than an hour - and the UTC had already approved the proposal itself at a previous meeting!

Van
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Re: Emoji

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

vanisaac wrote:I can personally attest to everyone here that actual thought and debate - I kid you not - has gone into whether the example glyph for an Emoji camel should be dromedary or bactrian
That's only to be expected — the camel itself was designed by a committee (allegedly).
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William
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

What new emoji would people like there to be?

Who decides which emoji become implemented?

Those so far seem to be because some mobile telephone manufacturers had a private agreement about having some emoji in firmware in the Unicode Private Use Area of some mobile telephones, then Google wanted to be able to archive unambiguously messages that used them and Unicode has agreed to facilitate that desire.

Yet if the manufacturers decide to add some more emoji, from where will they arise?

This thread has, as I start to write this post, 24 posts (1 original plus 23 replies) and 6121 views.

So, ladies and gentlemen, here is a chance to suggest some future emoji. I am not in a position to offer that any of the suggestions will be used, whether yours or mine, yet 6121 views is quite a lot so maybe, just maybe, people who make the decisions will read whatever is suggested in this thread and maybe, just maybe, some or all suggestions might get added into some future list and become implemented in mobile telephones and maybe Unicode.

So, here are three suggestions from me.

FLOWERING APRICOT TREE
OKAPI
DAVIDIA INVOLUCRATA SHOWING BRACTS

An interesting matter is that the mobile telephone manufacturers use the plane 0 Private Use Area whereas the Google transcription used in the encoding in Unicode process uses the plane 15 Private Use Area.

Would additional emoji need to be encoded in firmware in a new edition of mobile telephones or could they arise in software applications for the iPhone?

William Overington

3 February 2010
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Re: Emoji

Post by vanisaac »

William wrote:Those so far seem to be because some mobile telephone manufacturers had a private agreement about having some emoji in firmware in the Unicode Private Use Area of some mobile telephones, then Google wanted to be able to archive unambiguously messages that used them and Unicode has agreed to facilitate that desire.
Actually, it was worse than even that. The telephone manufacturers had promulgated no less than fifteen(!) different versions of Shift-JIS to encode their Emoji characters. The desire was not so much for Google archival purposes, but more because JIS and many of the mobile companies wanted to get a unified repertoire. I wouldn't know most of this, except that I am sitting in the UTC, and they are talking about Emoji right now.
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

vanisaac wrote: I wouldn't know most of this, except that I am sitting in the UTC, and they are talking about Emoji right now.
Ah yes, your post is timestamped as 04 Feb 2010 00:06, which is Universal Time, and California is 8 hours behind that, so it was made at 4:06 pm on Wednesday 3 February 2010 local time in California.

The web page http://www.unicode.org/timesens/calendar.html includes at the present time the following.

quote

UTC # 122 / L2 # 219 -- Feb 1 - 5
Hosted by Microsoft, Mountain View, CA
Feb 1 (10:30 am - 5:30 pm)
Feb 2 - 4 (9:30 am - 5:30 pm)
Feb 5 (9:30 am - 12:30 pm)

end quote

As regards the information, thank you for explaining the situation.

The web page http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html includes at the present time, though in the page it is in columns.

quote, with column breaks presented here as row breaks

F300..1F5FF

529

Miscellaneous Pictographic Symbols [Emoji] (Miscellaneous Pictographic Symbols block: 1F300..1F5FF)

2009-Feb-06
Accepted;
2009-May-15
Names and Code Points Changed;
2009-Nov-03
Names and Code Points Changed

2009-Oct-30
Stage 5

end quote, with column breaks presented here as row breaks

There is a similar, though different, entry for Emoticons.

There are also entries for Transport and map symbols and for Alchemical Symbols, though I am unsure whether either or both are in the same general framework as emoji.

However, I suppose that they could be used in the manner of emoji if a manufacturer of mobile telephones so chose, just as a manufacturer of mobile telephones could use other symbols already in Unicode in the manner of emoji if a manufacturer of mobile telephones so chose.

So, in view of all the acceptances and changes thus far, I am wondering what was being discussed.

I searched for JIS at Google and found the following link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_I ... _Standards

From that web page I found the following link.

http://www.jisc.go.jp/eng/index.html

William Overington

4 February 2010
William
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

I happened to look at the following web page again this morning and noticed that it has been updated as the page is now dated as 2010-Apr-27.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... t/utc.html

I had followed the link from the following thread.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2527

The thread is the "High Plane Unicode Mapping" thread in the support forum.

William Overington

11 May 2010
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Re: Emoji

Post by William »

I posted a note in the Unicode mailing list about the updated document.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0022.html

Markus Scherer replied in the following post.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0026.html
Note that the .html files there link to symbol image files that are out of
sync with the current code points and AMD8 glyphs. The emojidata.pdf file in
the same folder is up to date.

For more information see
http://sites.google.com/site/unicodesym ... ji-symbols
The pdf document to which Markus refers is accessible as follows.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4u ... jidata.pdf

William Overington

13 May 2010
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Re: Emoji

Post by vanisaac »

The Unicode 6.0 beta is now available at http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ . 6.0 adds 2,087 characters, including many new symbols; chief among them are the new emoji symbols, 222 new CJK Unified Ideographs, and three new scripts: Mandaic, Batak, and Brahmi, for a total of 109,448 characters.
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