Following up on Charlotte's comment:
for Unicode 17.0, released in September 2025, see:
1. *Unicode® 17.0 Versioned Charts Index
*<https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/>, which lists all
4803 characters newly encoded in Unicode 17.0, including 27 in
"Combining Diacritical Marks Extended".
2. *Combining Diacritical Marks Extended*
<https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/U170-1AB0.pdf>
which has pictures of new combining characters U-1ACF..U-1ADD and
U-1AE0..U-1AEB.
So, there have been new combiners in the most recent version of The
Unicode Standard.
—Jim DeLaHunt
On 2025-12-14 10:28, Charlotte Eiffel Lilith Buff via Unicode wrote:
> 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
<[email protected]>:
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.
--
. --Jim DeLaHunt,[email protected] http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
