Unicode roadmap

Although more than 30 writing systems (alphabets, syllabaries, and others) are included in Unicode, there remain many more still awaiting encoding. Michael Everson, Rick McGowan, and Ken Whistler maintain the list of such scripts and their tentative code block assignments on the Unicode Consortium Web site, at http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/.

Among the scripts awaiting encoding are the relatively familiar (or at any rate, famous) Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Babylonian and other cuneiforms, Phoenician, and Mayan, together with lesser-known scripts of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Many of them are not understood, such as the Rongorongo of Easter Island, Linear A of Crete, and Meroitic of the Upper Nile. For some scripts on the Roadmap, encoding proposals have been made and are working their way through the approval process. For others, no proposal can be made until the scholarly communities involved can agree on the character repertoire and other details.