L2/12-071

Title: Response to Proposal to disunify Emoji zodiac symbols
Authors: Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi
Date: 2012-feb-03

Document L2/12-043 proposes the disunification of Western zodiac symbols
based on their glyphs, including changing the relevant
EmojiSources.txt mappings for KDDI.

We are opposed to the remapping of the KDDI zodiac symbols.
Their existing Unicode encoding and EmojiSources.txt mappings follow
established practice in the Japanese cell phone industry of
round-trip mapping between the carriers’ zodiac symbols.
The round-trip mappings have established a unification,
although DoCoMo and SoftBank display astrological-symbol glyphs
while KDDI displays animal-shape glyphs.
Changing the KDDI mappings would destroy the round-tripping through Unicode.

Furthermore, since the glyph distinction and KDDI remapping appear to be the
main motivation for proposing new symbol characters in L2/12-043,
by rejecting that rationale we also propose that there is no demonstrated need
to encode those new symbols.

We believe that each of the following three options is an acceptable approach:

1. No change.

2. Addition of the animal-shape glyph images to the existing
   “emoji style” variation sequences for the relevant Emoji zodiac symbols
   in StandardizedVariants.

3. Addition of new variation sequences for the animal-shape glyphs
   for the relevant Emoji zodiac symbols in StandardizedVariants.