Did they give a reason why it was declined? Was it some bureaucratic "form not filled in correct" thing, or are they actually against the concept of it?

Seems like a conspiracy. Also it's so silly that pistol turned into water pistol.

Other great additions:

- Left and Right parenthesis with middle ring [1]

- A wiggly exclamation mark expressing mirth or laughter [1]

- Cuneiform numerals, including lots of arranged dots that might be useful in other contexts [2]

- New variations of "measured angle" and "sector" [3]

- A transparent cube and a white cube [4]

Also a couple new combining marks

And for anyone who wants to see what the reference images for the new emojis look like:

Lighthouse: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-1F680.p...

Other new Emojis: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-1FA70.p...

1: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-2E00.pd...

2: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-12550.p...

3: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-1CEC0.p...

4: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-18.0/U180-1F780.p...

I would be more interested if they are ever going to cancel HAN unification. Looking at their "Factors for Exclusion" list it could be summarized by "we made some mistakes in past but are sticking to it" :D

Still no seahorse

As an example of having not-exactly-a-character as Unicode "characters", it is rather rare that musical symbols are embedded in running texts (which is a primary litmus test for encoding), but musical symbols are typically rendered with existing font technology so there are needs for standardized "character" codes, as SMuFL [1] does. In fact Unicode 18 will get tons of musical symbols that have been in SMuFL for a long time but not yet in Unicode [2].

[1] https://www.smufl.org/

[2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25017-miscellaneous-musical...

> how do they handle changes in scripts, for example if new proto-cuneiform or seal script symbols are discovered

They get added in the next Unicode revision.

In Unicode you have "blocks" [0] that are often bigger than the number of characters in a script, language or function. There are usually also space for new blocks between unrelated blocks.

For example, in the case of cuneiform, it was introduced in Unicode 5.0, and there have been revisions in 7.0 and 8.0 [1]

--

  0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block
  1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_(Unicode_block)#History

> if not is there really a point to include everything possible in unicode ?

Needing to load three fonts to show a single document that mixes vastly different character sets is still infinitely better than not being able to have those different characters in the same .txt or .md file at all

> how many space is remaining for new alphabet and smileys ?

Unicode can encode about 1100k code points, and about 800k of those are currently unassigned and available for future scripts or characters

The Noto fonts have great coverage: https://notofonts.github.io/overview/

For now, follow UCSUR: https://sona.pona.la/wiki/Under-ConScript_Unicode_Registry

Does it need any additional code points?