wake up nerds, new Unicode® is out

most importantly to me personally, Unicode 16.0 comes with U+A7DA LATIN CAPITAL LETTER LAMBDA, U+A7DB LATIN SMALL LETTER LAMBDA, and U+A7DC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER LAMBDA WITH STROKE

these letters are siblings to the long‐encoded character, U+019B LATIN SMALL LETTER LAMBDA WITH STROKE. they originate with an American phoneticist notation and are used as part of the orthographies for many Salishan and Wakashan languages, spoken in the Pacific Northwest

see the proposal for more details: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23191-three-latin-additions.pdf

Unicode originally designated these characters, proposed in 2023, for a 17.0 release, which is a frankly glacial pace and i’m glad people succeeded in getting them to move it up

also new in Latin: capital ram’s horn; capital and lowercase S with diagonal stroke

lots for legacy computing once again in this release, including:

• a whole host of missing characters for Amstrad CPC, Apple II, TRS-80, Sharp MZ, Sharp X1… <https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21235r-terminals-supplement.pdf>

• five symbols for Smalltalk <https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21234-terminals-smalltalk.pdf>

Unicode has added a new data file, DoNotEmit.txt, which collects information about characters and character sequences which “should not” be generated in newly authored texts and for which suitable alternatives exist

otherwise, seven new scripts were added, and a ton of work was done on Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which continue to be a real challenge to encode