looking at the changes it makes me wonder:<p>- is there an usable font the cover all unicode ?<p>- if not is there really a point to include everything possible in unicode ?<p>- how many space is remaining for new alphabet and smileys ?<p>- how do they handle changes in scripts, for example if new proto-cuneiform or seal script symbols are discovered ?
> if not is there really a point to include everything possible in unicode ?<p>Needing to load three fonts to show a single document that mixes vastly different character sets is still infinitely better than not being able to have those different characters in the same .txt or .md file at all<p>> how many space is remaining for new alphabet and smileys ?<p>Unicode can encode about 1100k code points, and about 800k of those are currently unassigned and available for future scripts or characters
As an example of having not-exactly-a-character as Unicode "characters", it is rather rare that musical symbols are embedded in running texts (which is a primary litmus test for encoding), but musical symbols are typically rendered with existing font technology so there are needs for standardized "character" codes, as SMuFL [1] does. In fact Unicode 18 will get tons of musical symbols that have been in SMuFL for a long time but not yet in Unicode [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.smufl.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smufl.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25017-miscellaneous-musical-symbols.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25017-miscellaneous-musical...</a>
> how do they handle changes in scripts, for example if new proto-cuneiform or seal script symbols are discovered<p>They get added in the next Unicode revision.<p>In Unicode you have "blocks" [0] that are often bigger than the number of characters in a script, language or function. There are usually also space for new blocks between unrelated blocks.<p>For example, in the case of cuneiform, it was introduced in Unicode 5.0, and there have been revisions in 7.0 and 8.0 [1]<p>--<p><pre><code> 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_(Unicode_block)#History</code></pre>
The Noto fonts have great coverage: <a href="https://notofonts.github.io/overview/" rel="nofollow">https://notofonts.github.io/overview/</a>