Emoji: Public Review December 2008

From: Markus Scherer (markus.icu@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Dec 17 2008 - 17:34:06 CST


Dear Unicoders,
The UTC Subcommittee on Encoding of Symbols is working on a proposal for the
encoding of emoji symbols in the Unicode Standard and in ISO 10646, with
active participation by Google, Apple, Microsoft and others.

We would like to invite organizations and individuals interested in the
encoding of emoji symbols to give us feedback on the current state of our
data, in preparation of the proposal document for the February 2009 UTC
meeting which is critical for the timely incorporation of these symbols into
Unicode. Please provide feedback *no later than Wednesday, 2009-jan-14*.

The most important data items for the review are

   - The set of symbols proposed for new encoding
   - The character names of symbols proposed for new encoding

How to ReviewWe are looking for

   - whether symbols proposed for new encoding should be unified with
   existing or upcoming Unicode characters
      - See the Unicode 5.1 charts <http://www.unicode.org/charts/> for
      existing characters
      - See the Unicode pipeline
page<http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html>and the
      FPDAM6 <http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc2/open/02n4049.zip> document for
      upcoming characters
      - whether symbols unified with existing/upcoming characters should
   instead be proposed for new encoding
   - whether we should change the proposed name for a symbol proposed for
   new encoding

Please see the chart<http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html>with
the symbols data, including mappings to cell phone carrier symbols.
Briefly about this chart:

   - Symbols with a U+xxxx code point in the second column are unified with
   existing/upcoming characters
      - Note: For upcoming characters, the code points and the character
      names are provisional and may change. However, it would be difficult to
      change those character names at this point.
      - Note: Character names for symbols unified with existing characters
      are those of the characters they are unified with, and cannot be changed.
      - Symbols with a glyph number in the second column are proposed for
   new encoding
      - For these, please review the proposed character names, in the first
      text line in the third column. (The third column also includes
annotations,
      comments and font designer instructions. These are not part of
the proposal
      but are included to give background information.)

There is also a complete chart
legend<http://sites.google.com/site/unicodesymbols/Home/emoji-symbols/chart-legend>available.

For *feedback*, please send an email <emoji4unicode@googlegroups.com> to the
emoji4unicode group <http://groups.google.com/group/emoji4unicode>.
*
Note*: As issues are resolved, there may be a few changes in the chart over
time. In your feedback, please include the date.
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. More than 100 further emoji
symbols can be unified with existing characters or with ARIB (Japanese
Broadcast) symbols, which have been approved by the Unicode Consortium and
which are under ballot for ISO 10646. So review of the emoji symbols should
carefully consider any unifications (or disunifications) with existing
characters and with the provisional encodings of the ARIB symbols.

For more information, see the main Emoji
Symbols<http://sites.google.com/site/unicodesymbols/Home/emoji-symbols>page
on
the symbols subcommittee site <http://sites.google.com/site/unicodesymbols/>
.

Best regards,
markus



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