Unicode Emoji 5.0 specification now final

The new Emoji 5.0 set was finalized in March 2017, making it available for vendors to begin working on their emoji fonts and code ahead of the release of Unicode 10.0, scheduled for June 2017.

The Emoji 5.0 specification is now final as well. The specification has become a technical standard, adding conformance clauses and enhanced syntax definitions. A general mechanism for emoji tag sequences has been added, initially used for country subdivisions such as Scotland. The Emoji_Component property has been added, for filtering out characters from keyboard palettes. The design and usage guidelines have also been enhanced.

The 239 new emoji are also now available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

ICU 59 Released

Unicode® ICU 59 has just been released! ICU is the main avenue for many software products and libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

ICU 59 upgrades to CLDR 31 and to emoji 5.0 data, together with segmentation and bidi updates from Unicode 10 beta. The Java code for number formatting has been completely rewritten for reliability and performance. There is also a new case mapping API for styled text, and a technology preview of enhanced language matching.

There are major changes for ICU4C that will make ICU easier to use but require changes in projects using ICU: C++11, char16_t, UTF-8 source files.

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/59

Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final

Fifty-six new emoji characters are in the just released Emoji 5.0 data, including such characters as:

shushing face	mage
flying saucer	pie
T-Rex	broccoli*

* for healthy eaters!

The new Emoji 5.0 set is fixed, and available for vendors to begin working on their emoji fonts and code ahead of the release of Unicode 10.0, scheduled for June 2017.

The majority of these new emoji characters are the 34 Smileys & People, with 13 new Food & Drink, followed up by 6 Animals & Nature and a few others.

There are an additional 180 emoji sequences for gender and skin-tone in Smileys & People — such as woman in lotus position: medium skin tone — and new regional flags for England, Scotland, and Wales. This makes a total of 239 new emoji (characters and sequences). For a full list, see Emoji Recently Added.

The emoji charts have been updated to show the new characters and sequences. The draft Emoji 5.0 specification will be finalized in the May UTC meeting, and is still available for comment.

The 239 new emoji are also now available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.