Unicode 13 – save the \dodo! - ntg-context

Unicode 13 – save the \dodo!

Henning Hraban Ramm

5 Feb 2020 5 Feb '20

8:45 a.m.

Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard. Besides several entries for transgender representation, there are also new animals, and most important: “my” ConTeXt mascot, the Dodo! ;D see https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/emoji-released.html I still miss e.g. - adaptible colors for everything-else-than-skintone (e.g. vehicles) - political symbols (red flag, hammer-and-sickle – of course the selection would be a political decision and would cause problems with prohibited, e.g. nazi, symbols, but maybe we can just get simple flags in several colors? adaptible would make sense...) - lots of local and/or vegetarian food (Kässpätzle, Leberkäswecken, Schupfnudeln, veg. pizza, tofu…) - some sense… While I agree that we need some standardization in symbols, I still don’t think it was a good idea to mix them with text glyphs and bloat font technology with colors. Greetlings, Hraban

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Hans Hagen

5 Feb 5 Feb

9:29 a.m.

On 2/5/2020 9:45 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...

Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard.

Besides several entries for transgender representation, there are also new animals, and most important: “my” ConTeXt mascot, the Dodo! ;D

a never ending story i guess

...

see https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/emoji-released.html

indeed, i already added those

...

I still miss e.g. - adaptible colors for everything-else-than-skintone (e.g. vehicles)

and the cars should of course be recognizable as using petrol, diesel, batteries (and some ligature for hybrids, software cheats etc)

...

- political symbols (red flag, hammer-and-sickle – of course the selection would be a political decision and would cause problems with prohibited, e.g. nazi, symbols, but maybe we can just get simple flags in several colors? adaptible would make sense...)

i think emoji and choices are already political

...

- lots of local and/or vegetarian food (Kässpätzle, Leberkäswecken, Schupfnudeln, veg. pizza, tofu…)

i assume that at some point there should also be a descriptive file explaining what these symbols actually represent

...

- some sense…

indeed

...

While I agree that we need some standardization in symbols, I still don’t think it was a good idea to mix them with text glyphs and bloat font technology with colors. lots of weird things indeed ... kind of iconic esperanto so maybe som grammar will come too

Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Henning Hraban Ramm

9:45 a.m.

...

Am 2020-02-05 um 10:29 schrieb Hans Hagen :

On 2/5/2020 9:45 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...
Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard. Besides several entries for transgender representation, there are also new animals, and most important: “my” ConTeXt mascot, the Dodo! ;D a never ending story i guess

We need to compensate for all the animals that become extinct.

...

...
see https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/emoji-released.html

indeed, i already added those

👍

...

...
I still miss e.g. - adaptible colors for everything-else-than-skintone (e.g. vehicles)

and the cars should of course be recognizable as using petrol, diesel, batteries (and some ligature for hybrids, software cheats etc)

Oh yes, I didn’t think of that. You don’t need a ligature for software cheats, though, they’re default. But if combustion engines get prohibited, does that affect the emojis?

...

...
- political symbols (red flag, hammer-and-sickle – of course the selection would be a political decision and would cause problems with prohibited, e.g. nazi, symbols, but maybe we can just get simple flags in several colors? adaptible would make sense...)

i think emoji and choices are already political

True. E.g. the selection of national monuments. Why Fuji and not Uluru, Kibo, Matterhorn or Zugspitze? (ah, no, there are several Zugspitzen, just no Zugenden…)

...

...
- lots of local and/or vegetarian food (Kässpätzle, Leberkäswecken, Schupfnudeln, veg. pizza, tofu…) i assume that at some point there should also be a descriptive file explaining what these symbols actually represent

Recipes please.

...

...
- some sense… indeed

...

...
While I agree that we need some standardization in symbols, I still don’t think it was a good idea to mix them with text glyphs and bloat font technology with colors. lots of weird things indeed ... kind of iconic esperanto so maybe som grammar will come too

Good idea. There are a lot of emojis that I can’t imagine using or that I don’t understand, esp. facial expressions, even if I know western comic and manga representations of feelings. And I often miss emojis for the feelings I’d like to refer to, like some of those available in old forum software: facepalm, banging your head against the wall… Lassen wir das. Greetlings, Hraban

Hans Hagen

10:25 a.m.

On 2/5/2020 10:45 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...

Oh yes, I didn’t think of that. You don’t need a ligature for software cheats, though, they’re default. But if combustion engines get prohibited, does that affect the emojis?

they will be kept (like ancient scripts are supported) actually this is a problem with icons: will a next generation recognize them (like a thrash can being replace by a plastic green container ro vacuum cleaner or ...)

...

Recipes please.

could be a nice one for the next ctx meeting ... a recipe in emoji language Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Arthur Reutenauer

9:37 a.m.

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 09:45:09AM +0100, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...

Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard.

Just for the record: it is not true at all that Unicode is “mostly emojis” nowadays. Even today, the vast majority of characters added each year is 90% non-emoji. I make this point at every ConTeXt meeting I attend, but it really seems nobody is listening ;-) Best, Arthur

Henning Hraban Ramm

9:47 a.m.

...

Am 2020-02-05 um 10:37 schrieb Arthur Reutenauer :

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 09:45:09AM +0100, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...
Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard.

Just for the record: it is not true at all that Unicode is “mostly emojis” nowadays. Even today, the vast majority of characters added each year is 90% non-emoji. I make this point at every ConTeXt meeting I attend, but it really seems nobody is listening ;-)

I’m aware, just joking around. But we get new emojis all the time but AFAIK there are still characters/glyphs or whole scripting systems missing. (Didn’t research: What’s the status of hieroglyphs and cuneiform?) Best, Hraban

Arthur Reutenauer

11:57 a.m.

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 10:47:46AM +0100, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...

I’m aware, just joking around.

It was hard to tell.

...

But we get new emojis all the time but AFAIK there are still characters/glyphs or whole scripting systems missing.

You do realise that it’s not the same people working on emoji and ancient scripts, right? The implication that “if they stopped adding so many emojis they’d have more time for hieroglyphs instead” is nonsensical. More work is not suddenly going to be done on rare scripts just because emojis are rejected. If anything, it would probably be the other way around.

...

(Didn’t research: What’s the status of hieroglyphs and cuneiform?)

Should I google that for you? https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ch11.pdf “Chapter 11: Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs”. Since 2014! Best, Arthur

luigi scarso

9:49 a.m.

On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 10:38 AM Arthur Reutenauer < arthur.reutenauer@normalesup.org> wrote:

...

Just for the record: it is not true at all that Unicode is “mostly emojis” nowadays. Even today, the vast majority of characters added each year is 90% non-emoji. I make this point at every ConTeXt meeting I attend, but it really seems nobody is listening ;-)

I was. -- luigi

Hans Hagen

10:22 a.m.

On 2/5/2020 10:37 AM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:

...

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 09:45:09AM +0100, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

...
Hi, I’m a bit late: Last week the Unicode consortium released the latest version of their nowadays mostly-emoji standard.

Just for the record: it is not true at all that Unicode is “mostly emojis” nowadays. Even today, the vast majority of characters added each year is 90% non-emoji. I make this point at every ConTeXt meeting I attend, but it really seems nobody is listening ;-) we are waiting for you to predict the future, when do you think nofemoji will pass nofnonemoji (we could draw a curve of how much got added each version of unicode) .. visualizing your argument could help

Arthur Reutenauer

12:16 p.m.

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 11:22:26AM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:

...

we are waiting for you to predict the future, when do you think nofemoji will pass nofnonemoji (we could draw a curve of how much got added each version of unicode) .. visualizing your argument could help

It’s never going to happen. Since after the initial addition of over 1000 emojis from the Japanese telcos in 2010 (which few people outside Japan took notice of at the time), the rate of new emojis has been more or less constant at 50-100 a year (out of a total of 500-10,000 new characters / year). This is never going to come anywhere near close the 100K+ other Unicode characters that already exist. It wouldn’t be manageable anyway (not that I think it is now: it can only get worse). If the pressure to add new emojis is maintained, one of the big players is going to get tired of the slow process and solve the issue in a technical way (by embedding emojis as images for example, that wouldn’t be revolutionary) or -- my personal favourite, which over a decade ago I thought was obvious, but clearly isn’t -- they’re going to break away from the dependency on the Unicode Consortium and start maintaining their own repository of images with code points in the private use area. They’re plenty of space for that there. Best, Arthur

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Arthur Reutenauer
Hans Hagen
Henning Hraban Ramm
luigi scarso

Unicode 13 – save the \dodo!

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