The UTC Subcommittee on Encoding of Symbols is working on a proposal for the encoding of emoji symbols in the Unicode Standard and in ISO 10646, with active participation by Google, Apple, Microsoft and others.

We would like to invite organizations and individuals interested in the encoding of emoji symbols to give us feedback on the current state of our data, in preparation of the proposal document for the February 2009 UTC meeting which is critical for the timely incorporation of these symbols into Unicode. Please provide feedback no later than Wednesday, 2009-jan-14.

The most important data items for the review are

• The set of symbols proposed for new encoding
• The character names of symbols proposed for new encoding
  

How to Review

We are looking for

• whether symbols proposed for new encoding should be unified with existing or upcoming Unicode characters
• See the Unicode 5.1 charts for existing characters
• See the Unicode pipeline page and the FPDAM6 document for upcoming characters
  
• whether symbols unified with existing/upcoming characters should instead be proposed for new encoding
• whether we should change the proposed name for a symbol proposed for new encoding
  

Please see the chart with the symbols data, including mappings to cell phone carrier symbols. Briefly about this chart:

• Symbols with a U+xxxx code point in the second column are unified with existing/upcoming characters
• Note: For upcoming characters, the code points and the character names are provisional and may change. However, it would be difficult to change those character names at this point.
  
• Note: Character names for symbols unified with existing characters are those of the characters they are unified with, and cannot be changed.
  
• Symbols with a glyph number in the second column are proposed for new encoding
• For these, please review the proposed character names, in the first text line in the third column. (The third column also includes annotations, comments and font designer instructions. These are not part of the proposal but are included to give background information.)
  

There is also a complete chart legend available.

For feedback, please send an email to the emoji4unicode group.

Note: As issues are resolved, there may be a few changes in the chart over time. In your feedback, please include the date.

Background

Emoji symbols are widely used on Japanese cell phone networks and are encoded there as vendor-specific characters. A preliminary proposal for encoding those symbols and criteria for unification were discussed at the August 2007 UTC meeting. Successive refinements have been discussed in successive UTC and subcommittee meetings. Overall, more than 600 emoji symbols are proposed here for new encoding. More than 100 further emoji symbols can be unified with existing characters or with ARIB (Japanese Broadcast) symbols, which have been approved by the Unicode Consortium and which are under ballot for ISO 10646. So review of the emoji symbols should carefully consider any unifications (or disunifications) with existing characters and with the provisional encodings of the ARIB symbols.

For more information, see the main Emoji Symbols page on this site.