From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 30 2010 - 02:46:52 CDT
A thought experiment of how to enter any of the emoji characters using an ordinary keyboard.
How about the following as a first attempt? Suggestions for improvements are welcome.
Use a sequence of five characters and have software do the conversion.
The format is of two colons followed by three lowercase characters, usually from a through to z, but digits also possible.
The three lowercase characters are derived from the Unicode name of the character.
A sequence of two colons and then the first three letters of the Unicode name could be a good first try. If that were unambiguous the software system would enter the character. If it were ambiguous, a dialogue panel would offer a choice of the available choices, also mentioning the sequences for accessing those characters directly.
There is a special case of U+1F402 OX for which ::oxx could be used.
U+1F350 PEAR and U+1F351 PEACH could be represented by ::per and ::pec respectively. Entering ::pea could produce a dialogue panel showing the pear and the peach and inviting a choice to be made, the dialogue panel also mentioning the ::per and ::pec sequences as well.
U+1F314 WAXING GIBBOUS MOON SYMBOL and U+1F316 WANING GIBBOUS MOON SYMBOL could be encoded as ::wxg and ::wng respectively. Entering ::wgm could produce a dialogue panel showing the two gibbous moons and inviting a choice to be made, the dialogue panel also mentioning the ::wxg and ::wng sequences as well.
For the clock faces, maybe use three digits?
For example, for U+1F566 CLOCK FACE SEVEN OCLOCK one could use ::070 to enter the character and for U+1F562 CLOCK FACE SEVEN-THIRTY one could use ::073 to enter the character.
A most useful document is as follows.
http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/emojidata.pdf
That document includes those characters that are in the emoji set yet are unified with earlier Unicode characters and are thus not in the Unicode pdf documents for the emoji. For example, U+26F5 SAILBOAT, which would need including as ::sai unless ::sai would be ambiguous.
The post at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2010-m06/0067.html seems to be in the format of a press release and the title includes "including new support for mobile phones".
Will the Unicode Standard version 6.0 include mention of the unification of characters from the emoji set used in mobile telephones with earlier Unicode characters, also including a list of those characters of the emoji set that have been unified and where to find them in the code charts?
Will a person seeking to translate from the Private Use Area codes of present day mobile telephones to Unicode using the Unicode Standard version 6.0 documents alone be able to find easily how he or she should translate the yacht symbol of the mobile telephone, bearing in mind that he or she may not be familiar with the term SAILBOAT for a yacht or a sailing dinghy?
William Overington
30 June 2010
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