HarfBuzz 5.2 Released With Unicode 15 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HarfBuzz 5.2 Released With Unicode 15 Support

HarfBuzz is the text shaping library used by many open-source projects from UI toolkits to directly by desktops like GNOME and KDE and then over to other notable software like Java, Android, Firefox, Chrome, and many others. Out this weekend is HarfBuzz 5.2 and most notably adds support for Unicode 15...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HarfBuzz-5.2-Released

[uid313]

I wish they would add a raspberry emoji to the Unicode standard!

[timofonic]

I wonder what will they add to Unicode 16.

Are fonts updated to Unicode 16? Are there a list of fonts fully supporting latest Unicode iteration? I think the list may be empty, I consider this is an effort that should be started for the future.

[cl333r]

I wish they would add a raspberry emoji to the Unicode standard!

I just wanted to ask what's up with the hyacinth emoji? Why? Because if it's simply because it's a nice flower then we're up for another 500+ such emojis.
Btw, is there a cannabis emoji?? imho it would be far more usable.

[zerothruster]

I wonder what will they add to Unicode 16.

Are fonts updated to Unicode 16? Are there a list of fonts fully supporting latest Unicode iteration? I think the list may be empty, I consider this is an effort that should be started for the future.

I don't think *any* font *can* fully support unicode these days, there are just too many codepoints to fit in one font. The best you can hope for is to use the many Noto variants. Of course those will all take time to add new codepoints, and on linux you probably still need to adjust some settings to prefer Noto when multiple fonts cover the required codepoints.

Oh, and for Noto you also need to sort out which variant of their CJK fonts you prefer - the glyphs often differ and can look wrong if you use e.g. a chinese variant for japanese text or vice versa.

Personally, I can cope with having very poor coverage of ancient scripts or non-European non-CJK writing systems - I'd much rather use the disk space for something other than fonts. On those occasions where I find that browsing wikipedia results in a lot of boxes ('tofu') I sometimes add fonts, but on this freshly-built desktop I use 49 MB for /usr/share/fonts and my sources (on my home server) have over 3GB of fonts. it isn't just space for the system, it's space for the backups

Of course, when I *need* other fonts then I install them - but that is uncommon and my desktop systems are only normally active for a few months.

[Brane215]

Why is this extra crap in fonts even needed ?
Who really uses this ? Is there even one ONE font that covers all codepoints ?
Font used to be tool of written language - tool that conveys the likeness of its smallest units - characters or ideagrams.

IMO cramping everything else totally dillutes its purpose.
This makes practically every font incomplete ant thus seriously problematic.
Font is supposed to cover the whole space.
How am I to know which micropatches of it are covered by any given font?

And WTF really tracks the list of all these icons ?

[colejohnson66]

Font is supposed to cover the whole space.

Fonts have never supported all of Unicode, even from the beginning of Unicode.

Besides, you're not expected to have fonts installed to cover all 150k codepoints anyways. You're only expected to have what you need installed. For example, if you like Noto Sans, but you don't need Egyptian hieroglyphs, just don't install the Egyptian Hieroglyphs part.

This makes practically every font incomplete ant thus seriously problematic.

That's not true. The whole purpose of Unicode is to fix the problem code pages had. If I wrote my document using Windows-1252 (cause I'm American), then sent it to someone in Canada (which, IIRC, used Windows-863), the document could look wrong. With Unicode, however, if my document has U+00A7 SECTION SIGN, and I encode it with UTF-8, it's guaranteed to decode and display correctly.

And WTF really tracks the list of all these icons ?

It's an article about Unicode 15, so I'd assume Unicode tracks them, but don't quote me on that.