Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final

[Philippe Verdy]

Note: in your collection you say that the EU flag is the flag of the
European Union, actually it is a flag for Europe at whole, made and
proposed since long by the CoE, Council of Europe (not the european Union
that still did not exist, and not even the EEC or even the CECA that were
also created after the European Council.

The European Union displays the EC flag **under permission** permanently
granted by the European Council. The non-EU members that are CoE members,
or that were invited by the CoE, have a legal right to display it (so it
includes as well Turkey since ever as it was a founding member of CoE, also
Russia, Belarus even if its seat in the EC is suspended, Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, Morocco, Vatican, Andorra, Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein,
Norway...). When the CECA was created (and later the European communities)
it had initially no flag, but it rapidly started to reuse the European flag
proposed by the EC, because every member of the European Community was also
a member of EC,

In ISO 3166-1 however the "EU" code was granted to the European Union (for
legal reasons related to some WIPO standards with specific rules enforced
throughout the EU, plus optionally some volunteer countries in the EEA). It
usually displays the flag adopted by the CoE. There's no ISO 3166-1 code
for Europe at the whole (does it exist legally if we can't clearly define
its borders?) or the CoE itself (which has a logo derived now from the
European flag, but distinctive and reserved as a logo and not encodable.

Note that there's also a flag for a wider region with 56 countries covered
by the EBU (Eurovision Broadcast union), including for example Israel,
Palestine, Armenia, Georgia, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia,
Libya and Egypt (not to be confused by the logos used by the Eurovision
song contest: these logos are not flags). However the EBU still does not
include Kazahstan. The EBU howver is a private organization, and its "flag"
looking like a blue "(O)" on white, is in fact a logo and not encodable.
Another logo was used in the past that looked similar to the European flag
with stars on a circle (this old logo, initially monochromatic using white
stars on grey, slightly modernized, is still visible  along with some video
test patterns at start of some Eurovision broadcasts).

2017-03-29 23:52 GMT+02:00 Rebecca Bettencourt <beckiergb at gmail.com>:

> On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 2:17 PM, Christoph Päper <
> christoph.paeper at crissov.de> wrote:
>
>> If I made an open-source emoji font that contained flags for all of the
>> 5000ish
>> ISO 3166-2 codes that actually map to one, would I automatically be
>> considered a
>> vendor? Do I need to have to pay 18000(?) dollars a year for full
>> membership
>> first? (That's peanuts for multi-billion dollar companies, but
>> unaffordable for
>> most individuals and many FOSS projects.)
>>
>
> ...
>
> Those are desired, for sure, but so are emoji flags for Kurdistan,
>> Confederated
>> States of America, Romani, Oromo, South Vietnam, Esperanto, Anarchy,
>> Communism,
>> Bisexuality, Transgenderism, Sami, Pan-Africanism, Australian
>> Aboriginals, and
>> many more. Of these, only the Kurdish and the Sami flag *may* be covered
>> by
>> Unicode Emoji 5.0+ (possibly with multiple codes) until yet another
>> (Tag-based)
>> scheme is adopted.
>>
>
> Heh, I actually started an open-source emoji font that kinda does this:
>
> https://github.com/kreativekorp/vexillo
>
> It encodes not only some subdivision flags using sequences like [usca],
> [ustx], and [caqc], but a whole lot of nowhere-near-standardized-for-encoding
> flags under the XX code, such as [xxcascadia], [xxconlangesperanto],
> [xxpridebisexual], [xxpridetrans], etc.
>
> And hey, it works already in OS X 10.8+ and Firefox, even if it makes text
> selection a little dodgy. :)
>
>
>
>
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