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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

From the Bacon++ dept.

The Register [theregister.co.uk] is reporting the upcoming release of Unicode 9.0:

On 21 June, the world will become a slightly more agreeable place with the release of Unicode 9.0 - not because the standard will offer "Arabic characters to support Bravanese and Warsh, which are used in North and West Africa, along with Pakistani Quranic marks" and "significant updates to segmentation algorithms", but rather for the inclusion of a bacon emoji.

For the curious, emojipedia [emojipedia.org] has offered their renditions of these for your perusal.

Thanks to the work of TheMightyBuzzard, SoylentNews supports UTF-8 [wikipedia.org] character encoding. This would be a good time to consider finding an updated Unicode font [wikipedia.org] to embrace these additions.

Though it may seem like we are falling back to an age of Egyptian hieroglyphics [wikipedia.org], there are some more prosaic changes as well. The Unicode 9.0 Summary [unicode.org] follows.

[Continues...]

A. Summary

Unicode 9.0 adds exactly 7,500 characters, for a total of 128,172 characters. These additions include six new scripts and 72 new emoji characters.

Notable character additions include the following:

• Osage script to support the Native American language, Osage
• Adlam script to support Fulani and other African languages
• Newa script to support the Nepal Bhasa language of Nepal
• Tangut script, a major historic script of China
• Arabic characters to support Bravanese and Warsh, which are used in North and West Africa, along with Pakistani Quranic marks
• Emoji characters, including 22 new smilies and people,14 for animals and nature, and 18 for food and drink
• Symbols to support the new 4K TV standard

Other important updates in Unicode Version 9.0 include:

• Significant updates to segmentation algorithms
• Improvements in the charts for the Mongolian script

Synchronization

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and include updates for the repertoire additions made in Version 9.0, as well as other modifications:

• UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm [unicode.org]
• UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [unicode.org]

This version of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with 10646:2015, fourth edition, plus Amd. 1 and Amd. 2, and 273 characters from forthcoming 10646, fifth edition.

See Sections D through H below for additional details regarding the changes in this version of the Unicode Standard, its associated annexes, and the other synchronized Unicode specifications.

Original Submission