unicode / emoji in documentation (was Re: Common situations where a bug isn't real)

[Alberto Salvia Novella]

On 22/06/14 18:12, José Antonio Rey wrote:
> Maybe then we would fall into the situation where people who use other
> OSs and don't have the Emoji font installed in their systems cannot see
> them properly, or even the same stuff as with the Android/iOS example
> that was given before.

I have emailed the Unicode consortium about this issue of the standard 
not being practicable.

The message says:

As seen <https://lists.launchpad.net/papercuts-ninja/maillist.html> we, 
the Ubuntu Community, are finding some problems while trying to include 
Unicode Emoticons, Symbols and Pictographs as standard; as they're 
presented very inconsistently across platforms.

The reason behind that is operating systems have their own 
implementation of the standard, which can be very different from the 
other's, or not have implementation at all.

Personally I see he root cause is reference emoticons, symbols and 
pictographs in <http://www.unicode.org/charts/> to be under a 
restrictive license; forcing every party to implement themselves the 
standard. This can have no problem when speaking about glyphs, where 
changing shapes doesn't break the meaning of the character, but in these 
particular cases makes the standard not to be workable.

So these charts need to be under a libre license for the Unicode 
Standard to be feasible in the long term.

Thank you.