Draft UTR #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout

Draft UTR #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout is now available for public review and comment. The main changes in this version from the previous proposed draft:

• The intended interaction with document formats has been clarified.
• The guidelines for the assignment of a property value have been clarified.
• A number of characters have been assigned a different property value. 

Proposed Update UTS #18, Unicode Regular Expressions

UTS #18, Unicode Regular Expressions, is being updated to bring it into alignment with Unicode 6.3. Two new bidi-related properties introduced in Unicode 6.3 for the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm are being added. In addition, the discussion of script extensions is being extended and clarified.

The proposed update document is now available for review and comment. See Public Review Issue #252.

Membership Fee Changes

The Unicode Consortium is announcing an increase in the Full membership fee. As of June 1, 2013, the annual Full membership fee will increase from $15,000  to $18,000. This fee increase will enable the Consortium to continue its mission to enable people around the world to use computers in any language by providing freely-available specifications and data.

The Consortium has also added a multi-year discount option for all membership levels. Effective June 1, 2013, any member may pay fees in advance to receive the following discounts:

      10 years,  20% discount
      5 years,  10% discount
      3 years,  6% discount

For further information please contact the Unicode office.

Unicode CLDR 24 Survey Tool Beta

April 15, 2013 — The Unicode CLDR Survey Tool is open for beta testing today. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. The survey tool is an online tool used by organizations and individuals to contribute data to this repository, and to vote on alternative contributions.

The survey tool has again undergone substantial revision, with dramatic improvements in usability. We would appreciate people trying out the tool so that we can identify any remaining problems before we start data submission for CLDR 24 on April 24th.

For more information, including how to login, try it out, and supply feedback, see Survey Tool Beta.

UTC Document Register Now Public

The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) document register is now freely available for public access. This change has been made to increase public involvement in the ongoing deliberations of the UTC in its work developing and maintaining the Unicode Standard and other related standards and reports. Open access to the document register makes it easier to search both current and historical documents for topics of interest, using widely available search engines. The UTC document register contains online documents dating back to 1997 and online registers for paper document distributions dating back to 1991.
http://www.unicode.org/L2/all-docs.html

CLDR Version 23 Released

Unicode CLDR 23 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages.

Unicode CLDR 23.0 contains data for 215 languages and 227 territories—654 locales in all. This release focused primarily on improvements to the LDML structure and tools, and on consistency of data. It includes substantially improved support for non-Gregorian calendars (such as the Japanese Imperial calendar used extensively in Japan). The data and structure has also been modified to easily permit changing between 12 and 24 hour formats, and between 2 digit and 4 digit years. The new Unicode character is used for the Turkish Lira, and information is provided for currencies that round to 5 cents (or other subunits) in cash transactions. For most languages that use non-Latin scripts, characters in the language’s script now collate before those in other scripts (including A-Z). Language-specific letter-casing changes (Lower, Upper, Title) have been added for Azerbaijani, Greek, Lithuanian, and Turkish. Keyboard data has also been updated for Android. Also, as of this release, the LDML specification is split into multiple parts, each focusing on a particular area.

The release had a short cycle so that we could move to the new regular semi-annual schedule. It thus only included a limited data submission phase, for 4 languages only: Armenian (hy), Georgian (ka), Mongolian (mn), and Welsh (cy). For those languages, the data increased by over 100%.

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About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. Members are: Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Oracle, SAP, Tamil Virtual University, The University of California (Berkeley), Yahoo!, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium http://www.unicode.org/contacts.html.

Unicode 6.3 Beta Review

The Unicode® Consortium today announced the start of beta review for the forthcoming Unicode 6.3.0. All beta feedback must be submitted by April 29, 2013.

The main feature of Unicode 6.3 is the update of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm and five newly-encoded bidirectional format control characters: U+061C ARABIC LETTER MARK and the isolate span controls U+2066..U+2069. This version also rolls in various minor corrections for errata and other small updates for the Unicode Character Database.

Unicode is the foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, including all modern operating systems, browsers, and smart phones; modern web protocols (HTML, XML,...); and internationalized domain names. Thus it is important to ensure a smooth transition to each new version of the Unicode Standard. Software developers and other experts are strongly encouraged to review the beta data files and documentation for Unicode 6.3.0 carefully, and to provide any feedback regarding errors or other issues to the Unicode Consortium. Software developers can also get an early start in testing their programs with the beta data files so they will be ready for the release of Unicode 6.3.0 in June, 2013.

• See http://www.unicode.org/versions/beta-6.3.0.html, for information about testing the 6.3.0 beta.
• See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.3.0/ for the current draft summary of Unicode 6.3.0.

In Memoriam page for Unicode contributors

Unicode is a project that has been built by hundreds of people over many decades. Some people involved in this project are no longer with us, and we wish to remember their contributions: http://www.unicode.org/consortium/memoriam.html