« Hot Rocks: A Low-Tech Solution for Utility-Scale Energy Storage? | Main | The 6σ Neutrino Anomaly Nobody's Talking About: LSND and MiniBooNE »
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: UNUM 3.4: Updated to Unicode 14.0.0—Pregnant Men, Rejoice!
Version 3.4 of UNUM is now available for downloading. Version 3.4 incorporates the Unicode 14.0.0 standard, released on September 14th, 2021. Starting with this release, UNUM will identify itself with both its own version number and the Unicode version it incorporates, hence “3.4-14.0.0”. The update to Unicode adds support for five new language scripts, additional characters for several scripts, and 37 new emoji. There are a total of 144,697 characters in 14.0.0, of which 838 are new since 13.0.0. (UNUM also supports an additional 65 ASCII control characters, which are not assigned graphic code points in the Unicode database.)
This is an incremental update to Unicode. There are no structural changes in how characters are defined in the databases, and other than the presence of the new characters, the operation of UNUM is unchanged.
UNUM also contains a database of HTML named character references (the sequences like “<” you use in HTML source code when you need to represent a character which has a syntactic meaning in HTML or which can't be directly included in a file with the character encoding you're using to write it). There have been no changes to this standard since UNUM 2.2 was released in September 2017, so UNUM 3.4 will behave identically when querying these references except, of course, that numerical references to the new Unicode characters will be interpreted correctly.
You can download UNUM from the UNUM Documentation and Download Page. Source
code is maintained on and may be downloaded from UNUM's GitHub repository,
https://github.com/Fourmilab/unum.
Once you've installed UNUM 3.4, be sure to try:
$ unum 0x1FAC3
Octal Decimal Hex HTML Character Unicode
0375303 129731 0x1FAC3 🫃 "🫃" PREGNANT MAN
Yes, with version 14.0.0, the Unicode Consortium has joined the ranks of (or, perhaps, reconfirmed its membership in) the woke biology denialist mob, with the goal “to make the emoji keyboard more consistent and gender inclusive”. The “pregnant man character” probably didn't display in the line above as few platforms currently support it. Now that it has become enshrined in the Unicode standard, look (or look out) for it in an operating system update some time in the balance of 2021 or 2022.
Posted at September 21, 2021 12:33