Font Forum

Unicode encoding policy

There is a document.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14250.htm

Within the document, the following are interesting items.

E.1.7 Emoji Additions: popular requests [Edberg, Davis, L2/14-272]

Discussion. UTC took no action at this time.

Later, in the same document is the following.

E.1.7 Emoji Additions: popular requests [Edberg, Davis, L2/14-272R]

[141-C6] Consensus: Add the block U+1F900..U+1F9FF Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs for Unicode version 8.0.

The referenced document contains links to various requests and petitions for additional emoji characters.

In the referenced document, within section C, is the following.

5. Are the proposed characters in current use by the user community?
No

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This appears to be a major change in encoding policy.

This, in my opinion, is a welcome, progressive change in policy that allows new characters for use in a pure electronic technology to be added into regular Unicode without a requirement to first establish widespread use by using an encoding within a Unicode Private Use Area.

William Overington

23 December 2014

I feel that it is now therefore possible to seek encoding of symbols, perhaps in abstract emoji format and semi-abstract emoji format, so as to implement a system for communication through the language barrier by whole localizable sentences, with that system designed by interested people without the need to produce any legacy data that is encoded using an encoding within a Unicode Private Use Area.

A first draft petition could be produced and then later drafts developed by consensus and, when drafting has produced a document for an initial core system then a petition could be submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee.

Once in use, the system could have additional symbols added to it, gradually, so as to expand its capabilities as needs are identified.

So I am writing to ask if people in this forum would be interested in discussing and perhaps encouraging and participating in the development of this system please?

William Overington

23 December 2014

This topic is also in two other places.

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

There are already some replies in the above archive.

https://community.serif.com/discussion/ ... ing-policy

William

There are lots of new encoding proposals linked from the following page.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L-curdoc.htm

Some readers might like to view my contribution in the Other Reports section of the following document that is linked from that page.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15019-pubrev.html

William Overington

3 February 2015