Recent discussion on the proposed Newar Unicode codeblock has been met with silence (signifying disinterest, ignorance, or unqualified approval – or all three, one must assume). Those who did more than glance at the discussion would have been aware that that several areas of the Unicode codespace are expanding rapidly, many of which are going to infringe upon a far wider chunk of Asianists’ and philologists’ territories. In an age of character-constrained discourse, when just a few letters can reveal something important about you – OMG!* – and a picture tells the thousand words you don’t have the time to text, demand for emoticons, emoji and pictographs soars.
The Symbola font [download] has reasonably good coverage of the newer codeblocks. Other fonts by the designer, George Doulos, show how much work (non-Indological) classicists are putting into the codification of the premodern repertoire.
Other fonts which cover recent additions to the standard, like Quivira, are easy to find online.
Continue reading “Emerging Unicode codeblocks”