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Re: Unicode 6.1.0 released

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Rui Maciel wrote:
> Unicode 6.1.0 is a minor version of the Unicode Standard and supersedes
> all previous versions. This page summarizes the important changes for the
> Unicode Standard, Version 6.1.0. In the discussion below, Version 6.1.0
> may be abbreviated as "Unicode 6.1" or "Version 6.1."
>
> http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/
>
>
> It appears that the main changes to the Unicode standard consist of adding
> emoticons.  Does anyone know if this is really necessary?

This page

    http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.1/

summarises the new characters in 6.1.  There are several hundred of them (I 
make it 732), only 13 of which are added to the (pre-existing) Emoticons block.

But, that said, I don't see any obvious necessity to include emoticons in 
Unicode -- especially /cat faces/ for God's sake!

There is probably a rationale somewhere on the Unicode site, but I couln't find 
anything clear.  The nearest approach was a statement from

    http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m12/0063.html

(which is about emoji rather than emoticions as such) to the effect that these 
things are being used by phone carriers, but that there is no standard 
(cross-carrier) form.

"BackgroundEmoji symbols are widely used on Japanese cell phone networks and
are encoded there as vendor-specific characters. A preliminary proposal for
encoding those symbols and criteria for unification were discussed at the
August 2007 UTC meeting. Successive refinements have been discussed in
successive UTC and subcommittee meetings. Overall, more than 600 emoji
symbols are proposed here for new encoding"

which does, I suppose, provide a rationale of sorts.

    -- chris 

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Thread

Unicode 6.1.0 released Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2012-02-01 17:45 +0000
  Re: Unicode 6.1.0 released Sjouke Burry <s@b> - 2012-02-02 02:08 +0000
  Re: Unicode 6.1.0 released "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2012-02-05 12:31 +0000

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