Support Unicode 8

[Emanuele Antonio Faraone]

should add support to Unicode 8 (or 9) because the emoji present system are sparse and few.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

When reporting bugs, I’ve found it’s best to describe the problem first, before assuming a particular solution, because others may have better solutions. And to avoid the word “support”, because avoiding it helps clarify what you want.

Unicode 8 includes “7,716 new characters … 1,484 characters belong to these six new scripts: Ahom … Anatolian Hieroglyphs … Hatran … Multani … Old Hungarian … Sign-writing…; 5,762 … additional CJK unified ideographs…; 196 characters are Cuneiform signs used during the Early Dynastic Period (2900–2350 BC)…; 80 … lowercase Cherokee letters; 15 characters are emoji symbols…” <http://babelstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/whats-new-in-unicode-80.html>

Ahom and Anatolian Hieroglyphs and Old Hungarian and Early Dynastic Cuneiform are all extinct languages. I’m sure they’re fascinating to the academics who study them. But are they a good use of limited storage space on a phone OS shipping this decade? Probably not. Even if they were, would they all be designed, implemented, and shipped in one go? Definitely not. And if the current emoji are “sparse and few”, is it sensible to wait until 7716 new characters are designed and implemented for the sake of only 15 new emoji? Absolutely not.

The actual problem is not that we don’t “support” Unicode 8, it’s that none of the fonts we ship include the new emoji. That isn’t a Unicode problem, and it isn’t just (if at all) an ubuntu-keyboard problem, it’s a font problem.