Combining characters

[Phil Smith III]

Well, I’m sorta “asking for a friend” – a coworker who is deep in the weeds of working with something Unicode-related. I’m blaming him for having told me that :)

 

If it’s wrong, it certainly changes things a lot, and makes my question moot(ish?)!

 

From: Charlotte Eiffel Lilith Buff <irgendeinbenutzername at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2025 1:28 PM
To: Phil Smith III <lists at akphs.com>
Cc: Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Subject: Re: Combining characters

 

> The fact that there haven't been any new combiners in several versions

 

I’m actually really curious what gave you that impression. Pretty much every Unicode update adds tons of new combining characters (the only exceptions being those weird inbetween-y versions we occasionally get).

 

Am So., 14. Dez. 2025 um 18:39 Uhr schrieb Phil Smith III via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org <mailto:unicode at corp.unicode.org> >:

Doug Ewell wrote:
>Another, possibly more farsighted reason is that, if a newly needed
>letter-with-diacritic can be represented today with an existing letter
>and an existing diacritic, instead of waiting possibly years for the
>precomposed combination to be encoded, that time saving is a big win
>for the user community.

"newly needed letter-with-diacritic" -- does that happen? Venusian gets added and the ONLY issue is that it needs J+Combining Grave? I see the point but am not sure it's realistic, and in any case isn't what I'm talking about: I'm asking about NEW combiners. Though "invalid" combinations can be an issue now, with different engines rendering them differently. At least if code comes across J+Combining Grave now, the combining-ness is known. When a Combining Backslash is added for Jovian, well, now that character is new and normalization adventures abound.

>More combining characters that work essentially the same as existing
>ones don’t really add to the pain.

Actually they add a LOT of pain/complexity for certain use cases, because of normalization.

Thanks; I don't mean to sound like "Go away", this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for! The fact that there haven't been any new combiners in several versions (I think?) is what made me think that there might be some level of "No more, not now, not ever" policy.



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