Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2

[Erwin Denissen]

Version 6.2 of the Unicode Standard is now available. This version adds only a single character, the newly adopted Turkish Lira sign; however, the properties and behaviors for many other characters have been adjusted. Emoji and pictographic symbols now have significantly improved line-breaking, word-breaking and grapheme cluster behaviors. The script categorizations for some characters are improved and better documented.

The Unicode Collation Algorithm has been greatly enhanced for Version 6.2, with a major overhaul of its documentation. There have also been significant changes to the collation weight tables, including improved handling of tertiary weights for characters with decompositions, and changed weights for some pictographic symbols.

The newly encoded Turkish Lira sign, like other currency symbols, is expected to be heavily used in its target environment. The Unicode Consortium accelerated the release of Unicode 6.2, to accommodate the urgent need for this character.

For more details of this release, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/.

[vanisaac]

I believe they have also gone through and worked on standardizing the typeface for all the CJK ideograph representative glyphs in the updated code charts.

[Erwin Denissen]

The Unicode Consortium announces Version 6.3 of the Unicode Standard and with it, significantly improved bidirectional behavior. The updated Version 6.3 Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm now ensures that pairs of parentheses and brackets have consistent layout and provides a mechanism for isolating runs of text.

Based on contributions from major browser developers, the updated Bidirectional Algorithm and five new bidi format characters will improve the display of text for hundreds of millions of users of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, and many others. The display and positioning of parentheses will better match the normal behavior that users expect. By using the new methods for isolating runs of text, software will be able to construct messages from different sources without jumbling the order of characters. The new bidi format characters correspond to features in markup (such as in CSS). Overall, these improvements also bring greater interoperability and an improved ability for inserting text and assembling user interface elements.

The improvements come with new rigor: the Consortium now offers two reference implementations and greatly improved testing and test data.

In a major enhancement for CJK usage, this new version adds standardized variation sequences for all 1,002 CJK compatibility ideographs. These sequences address a well-known issue of the CJK compatibility ideographs — that they could change their appearance when any process normalized the text. Using the new standardized variation sequences allows authors to write text which will preserve the specific required shapes of these CJK ideographs, even under Unicode normalization.

Version 6.3 includes other improvements as well:

• Improved Unihan data to better align with ISO/IEC 10646

• Better support for Hebrew word break behavior and for ideographic space in line breaking

Our software allows you to use new characters even without updating the Unicode data, but it is more convenient to have updated data, as that will show additional information for each new codepoint. We will update our software within the next few weeks; If you don't want to wait, just update both UnicodeData.txt and Blocks.txt located in the Unicode folder of FontCreator. By default the location is:
C:\Program Files\High-Logic\FontCreator\Unicode

You can download the latest release from here:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Blocks.txt

You need to restart FontCreator in order to use the updated files.