Unicode mysteries

[Neville Smythe]

I have filed a bug report  bug_22561 <https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=22651>  re the misreporting of codepoints for unicode characters.

I am pretty convinced the treatment of the Rainbow flag emoji as three separate characters should be treated as incorrect behaviour and therefore a bug, I think the problem is that the vertical join codepoint 200D is not being treated as a codepoint within a character rather than starting a new character (while the glyph variation codepoints FE00-FE0F and the Variation Selectors E01xx are correctly interpreted).

 It is interesting to  see how the “transgender flag”, which is a new emoji not yet implemented in the Apple Color Emoji font but is supported by Google and Facebook, is displayed in various apps: in LC it appears as 4 glyphs (if the Gnu Unicode font is installed) but 3 separate characters; in BBedit it shows as 2 glyphs, in Pages as 4 glyphs but in both these case as a single character (delete char 1 or backspace eliminates the whole thing, you cannot place a text insertion between the glyphs).

One final LC bug. A number of Apple Color Emoji font characters, in particular the digits 1,2..0 are clipped at the top when shown in text size larger than 9. This is true with Fixed Line Height turned off - LC doesn’t adjust the lines for the extra ascent for some reason, and I don’t know of any other text setting we have in LC to fix the problem(?) Other apps show the characters correctly so it is not a design flaw in the font.

Neville