Deciding between a character and emoji proposal

[Ruben Arakelyan]

I was idly perusing the Unicode character set for religious cross symbols recently and noticed that the Armenian cross (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Cross) is not included either as a character or as an emoji. I am minded to submit a proposal but am hoping beforehand to get some kind of steer (however informal and non-binding) about whether it would be better to propose it as a character or emoji.

There are a number of religious symbols encoded as characters, including various Christian cross styles from different denominations. These may have been “grandfathered” in to the current guidelines, however, since they don’t always seem to fit the categorisation of being used primarily in runs of text etc.

There are also two cross styles (the Latin and Orthodox crosses) that are encoded as emoji, which would to my mind seem more appropriate, although these are duplicated from existing character encodings.

I am trying to work out whether my new proposal would fit better in the larger existing list of crosses encoded as characters, or if the steer now is that these types of symbols are better encoded as emoji.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Ruben Arakelyan