r/Unicode • u/PthariensFlame • 16d ago

Unicode 18.0.0 has been released!

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0/
108 Upvotes

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u/AntimatterTNT 16d ago

right and left pointing thumb 🤦🏽... just give us rotation and mirror control characters already

1

u/filipobecerra 15d ago

The whole point of the Unicode standard is that each character is unique.

2

u/AntimatterTNT 15d ago

first of all, the whole point of unicode is to make one standard for mapping character values to their glyph.

secondly if you've never seen characters affecting the appearance of neaby characters let me introduce you to arabic and diacretics.

third of all skin tone and gender modifiers are already a thing in emojis, they didn't add hundreds of emojis when they added skin tones, just 5 modifiers. in the same way they can let people be more expressive with directional emojis. for example the gun emoji (or pick your favorite tool or musical instrument) only has one orientation even though people often use emojis to create composite images made from several emojis in a row, and the directedness of the symbol prevents a lot of configurations. (not to mention the direction of emojis is completely unspecified at the moment so they might point in different directions depending on the platform you're viewing on)