More Emoji Draft Candidates for 2019

There are now 179 proposed Emoji Draft Candidates (61 characters plus variants) for 2019. These are the short-listed candidates for Emoji 12.0, which is planned for release in 2019Q1 together with Unicode 12.0.

The following changes were made in the recent Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) meeting:

1. Added a candidate emoji for deaf person
2. Changed service animal vest to safety vest, and added a candidate emoji sequence using it: service dog
3. Added candidate emoji sequences for couple holding hands, with 55 combinations of skin tone and gender
4. Changed names and ordering for various characters

The list of draft candidates will be reviewed and finalized in the next UTC meeting, this coming September. Feedback is solicited on short names, keywords, and ordering. See also the Emoji 11.0 charts.

Eight Emoji Provisional Candidates for 2020 were also added (ninja, military helmet, mammoth, feather, dodo, magic wand, carpentry saw, screwdriver). For example:

ninja	magic wand

Between now and March 2019, these and other Provisional Candidates will be collected. The Unicode emoji subcommittee will then assess the whole set, and make recommendations to the UTC for which emoji to advance to Draft Candidate status for 2020.

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Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

ICU moves to GitHub and Jira

International Components for Unicode (ICU) is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software applications. ICU is widely portable and gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C/C++ and Java software.

As of this week, ICU has moved from a self-hosted source code and bug tracking environment, to git on GitHub and Jira on Atlassian Cloud, respectively. Pull requests are welcome, as are bug reports on the new issue tracking system.

For more information, please see the following links:

ICU Repository Access: http://site.icu-project.org/repository
ICU Bug Tracking: http://site.icu-project.org/bugs

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Unicode 11.0 Paperback Available

The Unicode 11.0 core specification is now available in paperback book form with a new, original cover design. This edition consists of a pair of modestly priced print-on-demand volumes containing the complete text of the core specification of Version 11.0 of the Unicode Standard.

Each of the two volumes is a compact 6×9 inch US trade paperback size. The two volumes may be purchased separately or together, although they are intended as a set. The cost for the pair is US $16.58, plus postage and applicable taxes. Please visit the description page to order.

Note that these volumes do not include the Version 11.0 code charts, nor do they include the Version 11.0 Standard Annexes and Unicode Character Database, which are all freely available on the Unicode website.

Purchase The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 - Core Specification

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Unicode Consortium Announces Version 11.0 and Version 12.0 Cover Designs

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the design selected for the cover of the forthcoming print-on-demand publication of The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0. The Unicode Consortium issued an open call for artists and designers to submit cover design proposals. An independent panel reviewed all submitted designs. Because of the accelerated release schedule for Version 12.0 (March 2019), the design for the print-on-demand publication of The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0 was also selected at this time.


The cover for Version 11.0 is an original design by Joyce S. Lee, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley School of Information. Her artwork was inspired by the well-known early 20th-century Bauhaus design school. She explains, “I see numerous parallels between the Bauhaus and the Unicode Consortium, including an intersection of workmanship and technological reproduction, a spirit of collaboration, as well as a widespread cultural influence. With this Bauhaus inspired cover, I thus aim to represent the Unicode Standard as a form of instructional reference for technologists around the world.”


Cover artwork for Version 12.0 was created by Monica Tang, a computer science student at UC Berkeley. Her design was inspired by the simplicity of the geometric shapes that comprise the diversity of characters and symbols represented in the Unicode Standard. She notes, “Incorporating a variety of shapes and colors into a patterned design, I seek to convey the sheer breadth of the languages covered in the Unicode Standard as well as a sense of commonality.”

Runner-up designs by Feixiong “Hasutai” Liu and Maurice Meilleur were also selected. Hasutai is the founder and chief designer of Sir Sebsihiyan Sibe-Manchu Culture Center. Maurice Meilleur is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Appalachian State University.

Hasutai:

Maurice Meilleur:

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

New Gold Sponsor dotFM .FM TLD

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that dotFM .FM TLD is now a gold sponsor for:

dotFM .FM TLD's  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage.

BRS Media’s dotFM is pleased to sponsor Adopt a Character. This year, dotFM launched Emoji Domains within the .FM Top-Level Domain. Emoji domain is a domain name with an expressive digital image or icon in it. dotFM pioneered the ‘multimedia’ domain space since launching the .FM Top Level Domains in 1998. Today, the comprehensive portfolio of registrants not only includes broadcasters, Internet radio and the music community, but also interactive companies, premier social media ventures and podcast entrepreneurs worldwide.  — dotFM .FM TLD

The Unicode Consortium thanks dotFM .FM TLD for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 140,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character. 

ICU 62 Released

Unicode® ICU 62 has just been released. It upgrades to Unicode 11 and to CLDR 33.1 locale data. A new syntax for locale-neutral number skeleton strings can be used in MessageFormat for more control over number formatting. Several still-draft NumberFormatter methods and helper classes have been modified or renamed. In C++, DecimalFormat wraps the new NumberFormatter code, and there is a new implementation for number parsing.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/62

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

CLDR Version 33.1 Language/Locale Data Released for Unicode 11.0

Unicode CLDR 33.1 adds support for the recently released Unicode 11.0. Version 33.1 is the latest version of CLDR, the core open-source language data that major software systems use to adapt software to the conventions of over 80 different languages. The open-source Unicode ICU library incorporates the CLDR Version 33.1 data as part of its update to Unicode 11.0 in its ICU 62 release. ICU code is used by many products for Unicode and language support, including Android, Cloudant, ChromeOS, Db2, iOS, macOS, Windows, and many others.

The CLDR 33.1 release focuses on updates for Unicode 11.0: new names and keywords for the Unicode 11.0 emoji, Chinese collation stroke order, and script metadata. In addition, there are major improvements for names and annotations for the pre-11.0 emoji in CLDR languages. More extensive updates are planned for CLDR 34 (release expected in early October), with data submission still continuing.

For further details and links to documentation, see the CLDR 33.1 Release Notes.

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Announcing The Unicode® Standard, Version 11.0

Version 11.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, both the core specification and data files. Version 11.0 adds 684 characters, for a total of 137,374 characters. These additions include seven new scripts, for a total of 146 scripts, as well as 145 new emoji.

The new scripts and characters in Version 11.0 add support for lesser-used languages and unique written requirements worldwide, including:

• Georgian Mtavruli capital letters, newly added to support modern casing practices
• Hanifi Rohingya, used to write the modern Rohingya language in Southeast Asia
• Medefaidrin, used for modern liturgical purposes in Africa
• Mazahua, a Mesoamerican language recognized by law in Mexico
• Mayan numerals used in printed materials in Central America
• Historic Sanskrit, Gurmukhi, and the Buryats
• Five urgently needed CJK unified ideographs: three for chemical names and two for Japan's government administration

Popular symbol additions:

• Copyleft symbol
• Half stars for rating systems
• More astrological symbols
• Xiangqi Chinese chess symbols
• New emoji characters including:

For the full list of emoji characters, see emoji additions for Unicode 11.0, and Emoji Counts. For a detailed description of support for emoji characters by the Unicode Standard, see UTS #51, Unicode Emoji. Version 11.0 also includes other improvements for emoji handling:

• a mechanism to request the glyph direction for emoji
• descriptions of the four new emoji hair components
• descriptions of gender neutral emoji
• simplified statements of emoji-related rules for grapheme cluster boundaries and for word boundaries.

Three other important Unicode specifications have been updated for Version 11.0:

• UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm — sorting Unicode text
• UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms — reducing Unicode spoofing
• UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing — compatible processing of non-ASCII URLs

Unicode 11.0 includes a number of changes. Some of the Unicode Standard Annexes have modifications, often in coordination with changes to character properties. In particular, there are changes to:

• UAX #14, Unicode Linebreaking Algorithm
• UAX #29, Unicode Text Segmentation
• UAX #31, Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax

The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, including all modern operating systems, browsers, laptops, and smart phones—plus the Internet and Web (URLs, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, etc.). The Unicode Standard, its associated standards, and data form the foundation for CLDR and ICU releases.

Adopt-a-Character

All the new characters including the new emoji are now available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.