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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-many-to-choose-from dept.

Announcing The Unicode® Standard, Version 13.0:

Version 13.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, including the core specification, annexes, and data files. This version adds 5,390 characters, for a total of 143,859 characters. These additions include four new scripts, for a total of 154 scripts, as well as 55 new emoji characters.

The new scripts and characters in Version 13.0 add support for modern language groups in Africa, Pakistan, South Asia, and China:

[...] Support for scholarly work was extended worldwide, including:

[...] Popular symbol additions include:

[...] Important chart font updates, including:

[...] Additional support for lesser-used languages and scholarly work was extended, including:

When will the first, all-emoji story or comment appear on SoylentNews? What are people going to do if they use text-only browsers or are visually-impaired?


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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:52AM (12 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:52AM (#976801)

    Still no Klingon. Priorities, people!

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:43AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:43AM (#976810)

      I don't have the email from their list offhand, but they rejected Klingon because it is still under copyright and the rights holders won't release the rights to it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:25PM (#976931)

        Rights holder sounds like a real Klingon bastard!

      • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:39PM (2 children)

        by gtomorrow (2230) on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:39PM (#976988)

        Ah, well...behind every dark cloud there's a silver lining.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @04:07PM (1 child)

          by DannyB (5839) on Monday March 30 2020, @04:07PM (#977261) Journal

          Internet cloud servers have a metallic lining.

          --
          Some people need assistants to hire some assistance.
          Other people need assistance to hire some assistants.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:00AM (6 children)

      by driverless (4770) on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:00AM (#976830)

      Announcing the new Unicode standard! Now with even more emojis, including eight new poop emojis, an explosive diarrhoea emoji, and very topical, dozens of virus emojis! Also, stickers!

      Oh, and some languages and shit as well, but that's just an afterthought.

      • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:30AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:30AM (#976859)

        Are the poop emojis available in all colors and genders?

        • (Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:39AM (2 children)

          by driverless (4770) on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:39AM (#976861)

          Damn, no, they're only available in brown. Will have to fix that in 13.1.

          • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:26AM

            by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:26AM (#976872) Homepage

            Make the other one black-colored, then. There's Guinness and Coffee that can easily do that to a person. The eyes and smile on a black poop would be more dramatic anyway.

          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @04:08PM

            by DannyB (5839) on Monday March 30 2020, @04:08PM (#977262) Journal

            No!

            It's not just any brown! It's Zunetm Browntm.

            --
            Some people need assistants to hire some assistance.
            Other people need assistance to hire some assistants.
      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:45AM (#976863)

        This so much. They can add different skin colors, various combinations of people, 3 genders, etc. But they insist on Han unification.

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by TrentDavey on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:36PM

        by TrentDavey (1526) on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:36PM (#976960)

        moderate: redundant

        and shit as well,

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:37AM (18 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:37AM (#976808)

    "What are people going to do if they use text-only browsers"

    Is there anything being said here that can't be said in ASCII ?

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:39AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:39AM (#976809)

      👍🏻

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:36AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:36AM (#976883) Journal

        👍🏻

        In ASCII:

        Thumps up!

        Or site specific:

        +1 Underrated

        Or if you are concerned about memory:

        +1

        Indeed, in UTF8 the latter needs half as many bytes as the emoji.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by progo on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)

      by progo (6356) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:19AM (#976815) Homepage

      Pokémon; déjà vu; Björk.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:28AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:28AM (#976818)

        > Pokémon; déjà vu; Björk.

        ASCII translation works for me, I won't confuse these if they are spelled like this:
                    Pokemon; deja vu; Bjork.
        Yes, I know, I'm an ugly American, and I probably butcher the pronunciation. But this is a text forum.

      • (Score: 2) by NateMich on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:29AM

        by NateMich (6662) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:29AM (#976819)

        Is there anything being said here that can't be said in ASCII ?

        Pokémon; déjà vu; Björk.

        Pokemon; deja vu; Bjork.

        They did say can't be said, which I assume means at all.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:48AM

      Saves headaches for the eds when some chucklehead uses non-ascii quotes or emdashes in a story. And gives us something else to mock /. about.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:58AM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:58AM (#976846)

      NOT EVEN A PROBLEM NOW.

      Try getting a printer to print Japanese characters from a Spanish language laptop reading from a English based server. Go through this everyday.

      Then toss in misconfigured machines where FTP is one Code Set, HTTP using another, TElnet using a third, Printers using a forth, and final the server's datbase using a fifth,

      So is this a ! or | or is | and !... And the mapping error goes back to IBM and ASCII telnet terminals in from 70's. Shift 1 was I IBM equipment and a ! on ASCII terminals,

      SO many years cleaning this C__P up. encluding clean out databases.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:24AM (5 children)

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:24AM (#976871) Homepage

        There are two classes of problems, getting shit done and fiddling.

        Fiddling is why you have to write pages of Python code to make the text the Twitter API returns neatly jibe with your code, or why there's no function for a particular binary operation so you have to convert it into a string before fucking with it. Fiddling is why your fairly-straightforward new system build takes 4 hours. Fiddling was getting a Linux system up and running before 2010, period. Fiddling is dealing with a class of tedious but quirky problems that some other son of a bitch should have figured out and, more importantly, shared the solution to already.

        • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:07PM (4 children)

          by crafoo (6639) on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:07PM (#976928)

          Fiddling is also .. when I read your post, then start reading about unary and binary logical operations, then end up watching a 1:50 video covering axiomatic logic, propositional and predicate logic and it's use in mathematical proofs. Also how one of the 16 binary logical operators has a long standing mathematical feud over it's accepted logic table.
          Wasn't doing much this morning anyway.

          • (Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:38PM (3 children)

            by Farkus888 (5159) on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:38PM (#976934)

            It has been a long time since I read a comment I wanted to know more about so much. Links, please? I am also bored and curious.

            • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:33PM (1 child)

              by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:33PM (#976970) Homepage

              Pirate a discrete math textbook and read the first few chapters of it. Truth tables are tedious as fuck but then you get into predicate logic and that's kinda counterintuitive. Then do Set theory and then see how it neatly applies to combinatorics. Then if you really want a kick in the dick, keep on reading to those page-long proofs that prove the sum of two integers is an integer, or if you're an especially sick puppy, Stirling numbers of the second kind by hand.

              • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:10PM

                by crafoo (6639) on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:10PM (#977048)

                I might just do that. A textbook would be handy. I've just been watching pieces of this video series building up the math necessary for modern physics. How I got there was confusing but fun.

            • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:19PM

              by crafoo (6639) on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:19PM (#977050)

              https://youtu.be/V49i_LM8B0E [youtu.be]
              that's the first video in the series I ended up on.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:34PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:34PM (#976918)

        Write code on a mainframe using a 3270 emulator from an IBM PC clone where the flavor of the day could be EBCDIC or ASCII maintaining code written in the 1990s by people who thought it would run for at best ten years.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @01:35AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @01:35AM (#977080)

          I wrote 6 digit date translation and verification ASM code in 1980's that will fail in 2077, fixed our y2k error. I wrote in the comments, that I will repair in 2050, if I same still here. Got 30 more years to go, but was 4 companies ago. :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:11AM (#976887)

      Yeah, like 'ääliö'

    • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:45AM (1 child)

      by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:45AM (#976902) Journal

      FreeBSD has Unicode console. No X11 necessary. Unlike poor Linux...
      But, best fonts are on Apples, as always were. That's why I use Mac for a terminal...

      --
      Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:35AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @03:35AM (#977099)

        FreeBSD has Unicode console. No X11 necessary. Unlike poor Linux...

        Welcome to, oh, about 2010 or so? Give or take, depending how quick your distro of choice jumped on the bandwagon.

  • (Score: 2) by progo on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:17AM (4 children)

    by progo (6356) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:17AM (#976813) Homepage

    I was half expecting the next major spec version to have support for animated glyphs to support more emoji.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bussdriver on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:41AM

      by bussdriver (6876) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:41AM (#976823)

      When they put in those stupid skin colored modifiers that break some parsing (in a minor way) while ignoring REAL scripts needing support you know priorities are foobar.

      Emjoi need to STOP becoming virtual stickers. we had text faces before; we didn't need these and certainly not a ton of them. Food?? Really?

      Just leave open a range for pictures... oh, wait they did create a range for whatever Klingon BS you want to make up! That is where the excessive stuff needs to go and let some other unofficial standard fight over it. Maybe if something gets commonplace then you make a script to handle that subset.

      Every traffic and warning label symbol should get a set... universal symbols. Maybe 5 face expressions? I can type faster than look over 100 symbols. >:-(

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:44AM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:44AM (#976824)

      Yea, all they have got so far is an animated "work in progress" roadsign glyph. It's right next to the "Best Viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4" glyph.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:36PM (#976919)

      Stop giving them ideas. Please.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @04:19PM

      by DannyB (5839) on Monday March 30 2020, @04:19PM (#977264) Journal

      Java source code DOES support using Unicode. For example any language's letters for variable names.

      public final double π = Math.PI;    // Pi
      public final double τ = 2.0 * π;    // Tau
      public final double ℯ = Math.E;        // e

      private final int £€$æøå = 42;

      public void £€$æøåσΣ() { }

      /**
        * Sigma function.
        * @param fn a Java 8 Function that takes an integer an returns an integer.
        * @param first
        * @param last
        * @param step
        * @return Sum of calling fn over range from first to last, incremented by step.
        */
      public int Σ( java.util.function.Function<Integer,Integer> fn, int first, int last, int step ) {
          int sum = 0;
          if( step > 0 ) {
              for( int i = first;  i <= last;  i += step ) {
                  sum += fn.apply( i );
              }
          }
          else if( step < 0 ) {
              for( int i = first;  i >= last;  i -= step ) {
                  sum += fn.apply( i );
              }
          }
          else {
              throw new IllegalArgumentException( "step cannot be zero." );
          }
          return sum;
      }

      But I don't think Java will support animated animated glyphs in its source code. Yet.

      I can see that animated glyph characters in the source code are so important that I need to propose a JEP to get this into an upcoming version of Java!

      In the spirit of true Java over-engineering, the mechanism that implements animated characters should be deeply more general than just animated Unicode glyphs. It should be possible to create subclasses of characters for animated GIFs or video files, just to give two examples of the need for true extensibility. (At least a dozen XML files should be required for configuration.)

      You can be assured that the implementation will be of the highest quality, industrial strength and battle tested. Even if nobody uses animated characters in their source code.

      But it could make code reviews interesting.

      --
      Some people need assistants to hire some assistance.
      Other people need assistance to hire some assistants.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ShadowSystems on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:21AM (10 children)

    by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:21AM (#976816)

    Please stick with plain text.
    My 'reader (Jaws from Freedom Scientific, the best available for Windows) can't see emoji. There's nothing there to read, it goes dead silent when encountering one, so every time someone writes using them it renders what they've said essentially & effectively useless.
    Whomever said "A picture is worth a thousand words" must have meant that it takes that many for a sighted person to use in order to describe the bloody things, because my screen reader thinks they aren't worth the electrons used to create them.
    Please, if you want to stay a relevant & respectable news source, do not resort to using emoji in any official capacity. I won't ask that you block them from the comments, that smacks of censorship, but if the site itself resorts to using them then it ceases to be a respectable, reliable, or relevant destination.
    Thank you.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by progo on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:32AM (3 children)

      by progo (6356) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:32AM (#976821) Homepage

      Isn't this something Jaws can fix? All emoji have English names. I think Jaws should be able to say SOMETHING instead of nothing at all when it reads a message with emoji in it.

      But I'm not a fan of the concept of using emoji to write messages. Screen readers aren't the only place where emoji cause usability issues. I'm sure some people have a much harder time than others visually decoding emoji and inserting the meaning into the actual FLOW of whatever is being said -- it's a different language and it's mentally jarring. It increases the mental load to scan or read the text. (And, come to think of it, in the case of a more capable screen reader, it would probably end up using WAY too many syllables to get the point across compared to the case where the writer just used the right words.)

      • (Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:30AM (2 children)

        by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:30AM (#976840)

        Jaws considers emoji the same way it considers icons -- as tiny pictures with no text to OCR. No text means nothing to read & therefore inherently useless to the blind.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:51AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:51AM (#976864)

          Mine reads the official description out loud. I believe JAWS can be set to do that too.

        • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:52PM

          by Pino P (4721) on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:52PM (#976952) Journal

          I'd say submit a patch, but then I remembered what JAWS is. Is there still a reason you're on JAWS and not on something under a free software license, such as NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) [wikipedia.org]?

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:36AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:36AM (#976822) Journal

      That quote just means that chatterboxes find an excuse to prattle endlessly after seeing a picture.

      --
      “I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:48AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:48AM (#976826)

      I have been pondering about two ideas for handling emoji.

      One is a font that renders them as "words" instead of pictures. It would generate huge glyphs, and it would need to be created multiple times, one per language to support, as it would be a different glyph for each. It would be like those email address in webpages that are a picture of text, it would be visually readable but not searchable. The font would be huge, unless there is a font format that allows referencing strokes.

      The other is a system that filters all emojis and makes them plain text, probably marking them with with colons, curlies or something, :pistol: {banana} etc. This could be done with unix tools, no doubt (pipes with sed, perl... and uniname from uniutils handling the definitions), but "inserting" that into GUIs would be a lot trickier. This way should work for text to speech.

      In both cases, it would show how stupid they are, specially when the intended use is not the official meaning.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:11AM (#976867)

        It is sort of funny to get random emojis read out loud. Two messages that I've seen recently with replacements made as to how I heard them.

        Gonna get some tonight!! WINKING FACE AUBERGINE SPLASHING SWEAT SYMBOL

        Support CLAPPING HANDS SIGN our CLAPPING HANDS SIGN troops CLAPPING HANDS SIGN FLAG OF LIBERIA FLAG OF LIBERIA FLAG OF LIBERIA

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:53AM (2 children)

      We occasionally use one as a department value or when it's relevant, other than that we're old and grouchy and prefer anything outside ascii stay off of our lawns.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:14AM (#976850)

    Emojis leave me cold. The most important feature was that it finally gained support for symbols used on old computers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:19AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:19AM (#976852)

    Who are the clowns that suck money by adding ever more clown "characters?"

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:41AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:41AM (#976884) Journal

      Don't fork. When you deviate anyway, use the opportunity to fix all the errors Unicode made. Some of which are at a more fundamental level than the selection of characters to include.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:31AM (#976901)

      >> Who are the clowns

      There's a pink-haired SJW clown emoji that answers your question.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @04:22PM

      by DannyB (5839) on Monday March 30 2020, @04:22PM (#977267) Journal

      Unicode already has a fork. And other table service wear.

      What Unicode DOES NOT have is a wire coat hangar^W hanger.

      --
      Some people need assistants to hire some assistance.
      Other people need assistance to hire some assistants.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:41AM (#976894)

    What are people going to do if they use text-only browsers or are visually-impaired?

    Unicode is text-only. I can view the poop emoji in my text-only Linux terminal, no problem, because it's a font.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by gringer on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:48AM (1 child)

    by gringer (962) on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:48AM (#976904)

    🦬🦬🦬🦬🦬🦬🦬🦬

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
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