Announcing the Unicode Standard, Version 6.1

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Erwin Denissen
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Announcing the Unicode Standard, Version 6.1

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Mountain View, January 31, 2012. The Unicode Consortium announces the release of Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard, continuing Unicode's long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world. This latest version adds characters to support additional languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa. It also addresses educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new characters have been added. For full details, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/.

This version of the Standard also brings technical improvements to support implementers. Improved changes to property values and their aliases mean that properties now have easy-to-specify labels. The new labels combined with a new script extensions property means that regular expressions can be more straightforward and are easier to validate.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for emoji characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred display styles between text and emoji styles. For example:
  • 26FA FE0E Image TENT text style
    26FA FE0F Image TENT emoji style
    26FD FE0E Image FUEL PUMP text style
    26FD FE0F Image FUEL PUMP emoji style
Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will be finalized in February:
  • UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
    UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Announcing the Unicode Standard, Version 6.1

Post by vanisaac »

Note that the emoji-style variation sequences are mostly for those characters that were included in previous versions of the Unicode Standard, and were unified with the emoji repertoire. Characters added specifically as emoji characters - including all the emoticons and Plane 1 symbols and pictographs - do not have valid Unicode Variation Sequences. See http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Stand ... iants.html for a full listing of valid non-ideographic Standardized Variants.
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