GeezerVison

The new draft of Unicode Emoji identifies a set of about 1,250 current emoji as recommended for Unicode 7.0 implementations. The Consortium would appreciate feedback on this set of characters. To make review easier, explicit lists of these characters have been added to Section 3.

The Media section of the report has been moved to a new expanded page, unicode.org/press/emoji.html, and now includes links to video of the recent Emoji keynote. The selection factors for new emoji have also been extended.

An update to CLDR 26 has been released, only for the JSON format of the data. Some of the JSON data from CLDR 26 had corrupt identity information, which has been fixed in this update. The XML for CLDR 26 remains unchanged. Refer to http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/8018 for details.

The “Unicode Emoji” draft document has been updated. Changes include the addition of a draft description of emoji selection factors and draft chart images for the Unicode 8.0 candidate emoji.

Feedback on the document—including the candidate characters—can be submitted with the contact form.

Over the last several years, the Unicode Forum hosted on the Unicode website has not seen sufficient activity to justify its continuing maintenance. Accordingly, the Unicode Consortium is planning to close the forum, effective December 31, 2014. Most of the existing content in the forum will be kept available as a read-only archive, but any existing forum accounts will be locked, and new sign-up will be turned off.

We encourage forum users to join the ongoing, active discussions about Unicode topics on the email lists: http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html

Those who wish to follow only official announcements can also find those regularly posted on the Unicode Blog: http://unicode-inc.blogspot.com/

Announcement postings from the blog are also tweeted https://twitter.com/unicode as well as echoed on our Google+ and Facebook pages.

The Unicode Consortium has accepted 37 new emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 8.0, scheduled for mid-2015. These are candidates—not yet finalized—so some may not appear in the release.

There are many possible emoji that could be added, but releases need to be restricted to a manageable number. Many other emoji characters, such as other food items and symbols of religious significance, are still being assessed, and could appear in a future release of the Unicode Standard. Feedback can be sent via the reporting form.

Faces, Hands, and Zodiac Symbols

Symbols of Religious Significance

Most Popularly Requested Emoji

Missing Top Sports Symbols

The Unicode Consortium has released the draft “Unicode Emoji” document, whose main goal is to help improve the interoperability of emoji characters across implementations by providing guidelines and data.

This draft document also includes a section on Diversity, with a mechanism using 5 new proposed characters to provide a variety of skin tones for existing emoji characters.



The document is in “Proposed Draft” state, and made available for public review and comment.

Mountain View, CA, October 8, 2014 - The Unicode® Consortium announces the publication of the core specification for Unicode 7.0. The Version 7.0 core specification contains significant changes:

• Major reorganization of the chapters and overall layout
• New page size tailored for easy viewing on e-readers and other mobile devices
• Addition of twenty-two new scripts and a shorthand writing system
• Alignment with updates to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm

In Version 7.0, the standard grew by 2,834 characters. This version continues the Unicode Consortium's long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world with its newly encoded scripts and other additional characters. The text of the latest version documents two newly adopted currency symbols: the manat, used in Azerbaijan, and the ruble, used in Russia and other countries. It also includes information about newly added pictographic symbols, geometric symbols, arrows and ornaments.

This version of the Standard brings technical improvements to support implementers, including further clarification of the case pair stability policy, and a new stability policy for Numeric_Type.

All other components of Unicode 7.0 were released on June 16, 2014: the Unicode Standard Annexes, code charts, and the Unicode Character Database, to allow vendors to update their implementations of Unicode 7.0 as early as possible. The release of the core specification completes the definitive documentation of the Unicode Standard, Version 7.0.

For more information on all of The Unicode Standard, Version 7.0, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/.

The major Unicode security-related specifications and guidelines have been updated for Unicode 7.0. The security-related data files have undergone a major revision to improve their algorithmic consistency, as well as to take into account new information about confusable character data. We strongly advise that implementations be updated to make use of this new data. Pay particular attention to persistent data stores, such as database indexes, that use strings folded with the previous version of the data files. Mixing strings folded with new and old data files in the same persistent store will likely cause failures. It may be necessary to provide APIs for both old and new folding during a migration.

The guidelines have also been updated with descriptions of additional security issues. In particular, it is now clear that display of Punycode URLs as a security measure can, in some circumstances, actually make the spoofing problem worse.


For details, see:

Unicode Security Considerations: http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/
Unicode Security Mechanisms: http://unicode.org/reports/tr39/

Proposed updates for several of the Unicode Standard Annexes for Version 8.0 of the Unicode Standard have been posted for public review. See http://www.unicode.org/review/ for details and links to the various documents.

UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm has also been posted for public review. In this update, Cyrillic contractions have been removed. See the Modifications section of the draft document for further information.

Review periods for provision of feedback on these proposed updates close on October 20, 2014 for the November UTC meeting, but there will be further opportunities for feedback on the annexes after that November meeting.

To supply feedback on these issues, please see http://www.unicode.org/review/#feedback

A new revision of UTR #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout, has been released. The data tables have been updated, to bring them into line with Unicode 7.0. A few additional changes in the property values were made, mainly for consistency across similar characters.

Unicode CLDR 26 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks. This release focused primarily on Unicode 7.0 compatibility, Survey Tool improvements, increased coverage, new units, and improvements to collation and RBNF. Changes include the following:

• Data Growth: Major increase in the number of translations, with 77 locales now reaching the 100% modern coverage level, and an overall growth of about 20% in data.
• Units: Added 72 new units, added display names for all units and a new perUnitPattern (eg, liters per second).
• Collation: Updated collation (sorting) to Unicode 7.0, moved Unihan radical-stroke collation into root to avoid duplication, used import to reduce source size by 23% and ease maintenance. Major changes to Arabic collation.
• Spell-out numbers: improvements for round-trip fidelity; new syntax for use of plural categories.
• Specification: documented new structure, \x{h...h} syntax for Unicode code points; construction of “unit per unit” formats; clarified BCP47 and Unicode identifiers, and different kinds of locale lookup, matching, and inheritance.
• Survey Tool: Major improvements to the UI to make it easier and faster to enter and check data.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-26, along with a detailed Migration section.

Dr. Mark Davis  Unicode President and Co-Founder

The Unicode Consortium has announced that its president and co-founder, Dr. Mark Davis, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC), November 3-5. Dr. Davis’s talk, Emoji: Past, Present, and Future, will discuss where emoji came from, why they have gotten so popular, where they’ve gone wrong, and what the future will bring.

“Emoji became very popular in Japan right after they were introduced in 1999,” said Dr. Davis. “Once they were added to Unicode in 2010, they became popular worldwide, used in modern mobile phones, texting systems, email, and so on. For example, there were some 6,000 articles on emoji in the month after Unicode 7.0 released, according to Google News.”

Dr. Davis will explore the history of emoji, how they came to be added to Unicode, how they are used in practice, and some of the deficiencies that people see. For example, what about the lack of human diversity and why isn’t there a hot dog emoji? He will then illuminate some of the future additions from Unicode and answer some of the most common questions about emoji.

IUC is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. Subject areas include the global impact, programming practices, fonts and rendering, and mobile computing. For the eighth year, Adobe will be sponsoring the conference.

To view the full IUC agenda and to register, visit www.unicodeconference.org.

The UTC is considering a significant change to the encoding model for New Tai Lue script from logical order to visual order for Unicode 8.0. Details of the proposal are in the background document.

Please see the PRI page: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri281/ for further information about how to discuss this Public Review Issue and how to supply formal feedback.

UTR #23, The Unicode Character Property Model, is being updated, to bring it back into synchronization with the latest release of the Unicode Standard. All citations to definitions from the conformance section of the standard have been corrected, and references to the standard have been updated from Version 5.0 to Version 7.0.

Reviewers of the proposed update of this document are invited to check the rest of the content and to make suggestions for improvement of the text.

The closing date for this issue is October 20, 2014. For information about how to discuss this Public Review Issue and how to supply formal feedback, please see the feedback and discussion instructions on the PRI page.

The proposed update for Unicode 8.0 addresses three issues where the bidirectional algorithm, as written, did not produce the intended results in certain specific cases. Details and justification for the proposed changes to the specification are in a background document accessible from the PRI page.

The closing date for this issue is October 20, 2014. For information about how to discuss this issue and how to supply formal feedback, please see the feedback and discussion instructions on the PRI page.

The Public Review Issues index page is: http://www.unicode.org/review/

The Unicode Consortium has changed its publication schedule for versions of the Unicode Standard. Starting with the recent Version 7.0, a new major version of the Unicode Standard will be published each year in June.

This new schedule provides reliability and predictability for all software using Unicode. Implementers can now plan well ahead for the appearance of each new version.

Look for Unicode 8.0 in June of 2015.

The Unicode Technical Committee would like to eliminate some ambiguity in the assignment of the character properties Script and Script_Extensions and is seeking input from developers.

There are currently a small number of characters whose Script value is explicit (neither Common nor Inherited) and whose Script_Extensions value set has more than one value (a “diverse” value set). These characters are not typical; most characters with a diverse Script_Extensions value set have a Script value of either Common or Inherited. Possible policies and solutions are discussed and outlined in the proposal:

PRI #277 Reconciling Script and Script_Extensions Character Properties

The Unicode Technical Committee is soliciting feedback on pending additions to the draft repertoire of characters, to help discover any errors in character names, incorrect glyphs, or other problems. There is a short window of opportunity to review and comment on the repertoire additions noted below.

• The following draft repertoire from ISO/IEC 10646:2014 (4th Edition), which is in its PDAM stage, is under review: Draft Additional Repertoire for Amendment 2 to ISO/IEC 10646:2014 (4th Edition).

The Unicode Standard is developed in synchrony with ISO/IEC 10646. After ISO balloting is completed on any repertoire additions, no further changes or corrections will be possible. (See http://www.unicode.org/faq/sdos.html for additional information on the stages in ISO standards development.) Advance feedback on these repertoire additions will help inform the UTC discussions about its own contribution to the ISO balloting process.

Please see the PRI page for further details:
PRI #276, Feedback on repertoire for ISO/IEC 10646:2014 (4th Edition, Amendment 2)

Please also see the general instructions for Public Review Issues.

Version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, adding 2,834 new characters. This latest version adds the new currency symbols for the Russian ruble and Azerbaijani manat, approximately 250 emoji (pictographic symbols), many other symbols, and 23 new lesser-used and historic scripts, as well as character additions to many existing scripts. These additions extend support for written languages of North America, China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa. For full details, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/.

Most of the new emoji characters derive from characters in long-standing and widespread use in Wingdings and Webdings fonts. Additions to emoji characters include, for example:

Major enhancements were made to the Indic script properties. New property values were added to enable a more algorithmic approach to rendering Indic scripts. These include properties for joining behavior, new classes for numbers, and a further division of the syllabic categories of viramas and rephas. With these enhancements, the default rendering for newly added Indic scripts can be significantly improved.

Unicode character properties were extended to the new characters. The old characters have enhancements to Script and Alphabetic properties, and casing and line-breaking behavior. There were also nearly 3,000 new Cantonese pronunciation entries, as well as new or clarified stability policies for promoting interoperable implementations.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 7.0. These will be released at the same time:

• UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm — the standard for sorting Unicode text
• UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing — for processing of non-ASCII URLs (IDNs)

The documents and data for two Public Review Issues have been recently revised. The issues are PRI #272 Proposed Update UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations and PRI #273 Proposed Update UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms.

We have revised the draft data for UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms (confusables and identifier restrictions) for review. There are also some small changes to the text of  UTR #36: Unicode Security Considerations, mostly cleanup in preparation for publication. The most important data files for review are:

• http://unicode.org/Public/security/7.0.0/confusablesSummary.txt
  The number of identified confusables increased from 6,156 items to 6,673, about an 8% gain. The most important characters to review are those that are confusable with high-use scripts. We ask reviewers to pay particular attention to characters confusable with characters from high-use scripts.
• http://unicode.org/Public/security/7.0.0/xidmodifications.txt
  There are very few new allowed characters from 7.0; most are marked as restricted. We ask reviewers to confirm that none of the restricted characters are in high-frequency modern use.

These files can be downloaded from http://unicode.org/Public/security/7.0.0 and diffed against the corresponding files in http://unicode.org/Public/security/6.3.0
 
The comment period ends July 28, 2014.

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the release of version 2014-05-16 of the Unicode Ideographic Variation Database (IVD). This release registers the new Moji_Joho collection, along with the first 10,710 sequences in that collection, 9,685 of which are shared by the registered Hanyo-Denshi collection. Details can be found at http://www.unicode.org/ivd/.

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is pleased to announce the opening of the CLDR Survey Tool for data submission for Version 26 of CLDR, on May 13, 2014. We plan to allow data submission until June 19, and vetting of the submitted data until July 3. Version 26 is scheduled to be released in September 2014.

CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, and is used by much of the world’s software. Highlights for the CLDR 26 release are:

• Microsoft has joined the CLDR project as a major contributing partner.
• The survey tool user interface has undergone a major overhaul, thanks to the hard work of our friends at Apple.
• Google and IBM have focused on performance of the software, and we’ve also upgraded our hardware.
• New types of fields and structure are added, including many additional types of units.
• The new characters in the Unicode encoding standard (Version 7.0, due for release in July, 2014) are supported.

The CLDR survey tool can be reached by going to http://st.unicode.org/cldr-apps/survey. To view known issues with the tool, see the Known Issues page at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/known-bugs. For example, we are still putting some finishing touches on some of the survey tool documentation.

Anyone is welcome to try out the tool, although only those with accounts will be able to make changes. To get an account, or if you have forgotten your login ID or password, please contact your CLDR TC representative. If you don't belong to a Unicode member organization, and are a native speaker of a language other than American English, you can obtain a guest account.

Any bugs with the tool can be reported to the CLDR committee by opening a New CLDR Ticket at http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket

Thanks in advance for your participation in the Unicode CLDR project!

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is pleased to announce the opening of the CLDR Survey Tool for beta testing for Version 26 of CLDR, on May 1, 2014. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.

The beta test will give CLDR contributors a chance to try out the new features of the tool, without having to worry about the potential impacts on CLDR itself. If all seems to be going well during the beta test period, we plan to open the survey tool for "official" data submission on or about Thursday, May 8.

We plan to allow data submission until June 19, and data vetting until July 3. Version 26 is scheduled to be released in September 2014.

Highlights for the CLDR 26 release:

• Microsoft has agreed to join the CLDR project as a major contributing partner.
• The survey tool user interface has undergone a major overhaul, thanks to the hard work of our friends at Apple.  Hopefully, users will find the interface more intuitive and easier to navigate.
• Google and IBM have also contributed significantly, especially in the area of improving performance. We have also upgraded our hardware, so we are hoping for less down-time and fewer interruptions to your work.
• New types of fields and structure, including many additional types of units. See new features in Version 26​.
• The first version to support the new characters in the Unicode encoding standard, Version 7.0, due for release in July, 2014.

The CLDR survey tool can be reached by going to http://st.unicode.org/cldr/apps/survey.

For known issues in the beta version, see Known Issues.

Anyone is welcome to try out the tool, although only those with accounts will be able to make changes. To get an account, or if you have forgotten your login ID or password, please contact your CLDR TC representative.

If you don't belong to a Unicode member organization, and are a native speaker of a language other than American English, you can obtain a guest account.

Any bugs with the tool can be reported to the CLDR committee by opening a new ticket at http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket

Thanks in advance for your participation in the Unicode CLDR project!

Proposed updates are now available for UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations, and UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms. These are both being updated to correspond with Unicode 7.0.

PRI #272, Proposed Update UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations:
This UTR is being updated. In this draft, a description has been added about the downside of displaying URLs as Punycode. A note has also been added on the use of Catalan in identifiers.

PRI #273, Proposed Update UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms:
This UTS is being updated to correspond with Unicode 7.0. Text has been added about the use of NFC, and on the use of Catalan in identifiers. A note has been added on the collection of confusable data outside of Status=allowed, such as for non-NFKC characters.

Review notes solicit feedback on whether to (a) add multi-character sequences to the data file, (b) change some of the Type values, and (c) base the data more on CLDR exemplars, and/or (d) change the format of the data files.

The closing date for both of these issues is April 28, 2014. For information about how to discuss this Public Review Issue and how to supply formal feedback, please see the feedback and discussion instructions on the PRI pages.

The Public Review Issues page is: http://www.unicode.org/review/

Unicode CLDR 25 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

Unicode CLDR 25 focused primarily on improvements to the LDML structure and tools, and on consistency of data. There are many smaller data fixes, but there was no general data submission. Changes include the following:

• New rules for plural ranges (1-2 liters) for 72 locales, plurals for 2 locales, and ordinals for 18 locales.
• Better locale matching with fallbacks for languages, default languages for continents and subcontinents, and default scripts for more languages.
• Two new locales: West Frisian (fy) and Uyghur (ug).
• Two new metazones: Mexico_Pacific and Mexico_Northwest
• Updated zh pinyin & zhuyin collations and translators for Unicode 6.3 kMandarin data
• Updated keyboard layout data for OSX, Windows and others.

This version contains data for 238 languages and 259 territories—740 locales in all.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-25, along with a detailed Migration section.

The next version of the Unicode Standard will be Version 7.0.0. The beta information page for Unicode 7.0.0 is located at: http://www.unicode.org/versions/beta-7.0.0.html
 
This version is planned for release in July 2014. A beta version of the 7.0.0 Unicode Character Database files is also available for public comment. We strongly encourage implementers to download these files and test them with their programs, well before the end of the beta period, April 28, 2014. These files are located in:

http://www.unicode.org/Public/7.0.0/
ftp://www.unicode.org/Public/7.0.0/
 
For detailed information and guidance on how to focus your review, see the section Notable Issues for Beta Testers on the beta page.

The Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) will be released in parallel with Unicode 7.0.0, and a beta version of the UCA is available at http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCA/7.0.0/. See also PRI #260.

Unicode 7.0 is slated to be released early in 2014Q3. Now is your opportunity to comment on the contents of this release.

The text of the Unicode Standard Annexes (segmentation, normalization, line breaking, identifiers, etc.) is open for comments and feedback, with proposed update versions for many of the documents posted at UAX Proposed Updates. Changes for the text of the annexes is relatively minor for Unicode 7.0, but the documents could still benefit from careful review. For some of the annexes, no proposed update version is posted, because there is no planned change to the content other than a nominal change to the version numbering. In such cases, feedback provided on the existing, published Unicode Standard Annex is still welcome, and will be taken into consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee before the release of Unicode 7.0.

Feedback on the Unicode Standard Annexes for Unicode 7.0 should be submitted by April 28, 2014, for review at the Unicode Technical Committee meeting in May.

Other planned changes for Unicode 7.0 include a large number of additions to the character repertoire and corresponding updates to the Unicode character properties. An announcement will be sent soon, when the beta version of the Unicode Character Database for Unicode 7.0 is available for comment.

This Unicode Standard Annex will be updated for Unicode 7.0. The proposed update is now available for general public review and comment.

The exception list for SpacingMark has been updated for Unicode 7.0. That list excludes specific characters from being assigned the Grapheme_Cluster_Break property value SpacingMark by default. 

Please see the PRI page for details and instructions on how to review this issue and provide comments: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri265/

Do you have knowledge or experience with creating global software that will benefit others? Join other experts and industry leaders and present your ideas at The Thirty-eighth Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 38), taking place in Santa Clara, Calif., USA; November 3-5, 2014. This is the premier conference on technologies and practices for the creation and management of global and multilingual software solutions.

The Unicode Consortium hosts this event annually, and the conference is recognized for its excellent technical content, industry-tested recommendations and updates on the latest standards. Topics from previous conferences can be found on the IUC 38 website.
Submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials regarding case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards.

For details please see: http://www.unicodeconference.org/e/IUC38-CfP-01-21-14.htm

This UTS is being updated to synchronize with Unicode 7.0. The text is now open for public review, and the UTC is seeking feedback. Please see the PRI page for details and instructions on how to review this issue and provide comments: http://www.unicode.org/review/pri264/

This PRI, Sequences to Select From Multiple C2-Conjoining Forms in Malayalam, deals with the specification of sequences to indicate a preference when multiple C2 Conjoining forms are possible. The UTC is seeking feedback on this proposal, regarding its advisability and potential impacts on implementations, as well as any suggestions for alternative approaches to the issues raised in the background document.

Please see the submission page for details and instructions on how to review this issue and provide comments.

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