Re: policy on shipping/using flags

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh gmail com>]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh gmail com> wrote:
> * Presently, the Unicode consortium is considering a proposal to
> encode various symbols (called emoji) used in Japanese cellphones in
> the Unicode Standard. This very large set includes flags of a few
> countries, like the flag of the People's Republic of China:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html#e-4E5
> [warning: hundreds of small icons on the page]
>
> From what I can tell, the proposal has a very high chance of
> acceptance, and those flags will become Unicode characters. When fonts
> we ship start to include glyphs for such flags, what do we do? Do we
> remove them from the fonts when shipping them?

I am just back from the Unicode Technical Committee meeting. During
the emoji discussions, as a GNOME's representatives to Unicode, I
mentioned some of the controversial issues that will raise if Unicode
encodes flags.

The committee agreed to not encode those characters as flags, but only
as place-holder characters for compatibility with Japanese telephone
company standards.

The characters are now only called Emoji Symbol GB, Emoji Symbol CN,
Emoji Symbol RU, etc, and their glyphs are just the two letters in a
dashed box, like this:

http://unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/fontimg/AEmoji_E4ED.png

So, no worries on this part of the flags issue anymore.

Roozbeh