A proposal has been submitted to the Unicode Consortium — a nonprofit organization that develops and approves emoji — asking for a rainbow flag emoji. The formal proposition was sent by a Google employee Mark Davis, who incidentally is a co-founder of Unicode and its current president.
“Because existing Unicode characters are used, vendors can begin design and implementation work now and can deploy before the end of 2016, rather than waiting for Unicode v10.0 to come out in June of 2017,” reads the proposal.
Buzzfeed reports the code for the existing flag emoji can be used to create the rainbow emoji using a zero-width joiner process (the technology used to create various skin tones) making it relatively easy.
“Essentially, each emoji zwj sequence is treated like a ligature, resulting in a single glyph being displayed on the screen,” writes Davis in the proposal. “Keyboard input, segmentation, and other operations are modified to handle the sequence as a whole unit. These emoji zwj sequences are already used to represent diverse family groupings and others, and could be extended relatively quickly.”
Last week, Google announced Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee will introduce 11 new female emojis of varying professions in every available skin tone and would be adding female and male versions to 33 existing emojis.
