Re: Combining characters

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