New Public Review Issue #173: Invariant Tests

The Unicode Technical Committee has posted a new issue for public
review and comment. Details are on the following web page:

http://www.unicode.org/review/#pri173

Review periods for the new items close on August 2, 2010.

Please see the page for links to discussion and relevant documents.
Briefly, the new issue is:

Issue #173 Invariant Tests
This PRI proposes to add to the UCD a new machine-readable file that is
used to test invariants for each release of Unicode. The data documents
what is tested prior to the release of a version of the UCD. UAX #44
would be augmented with a short section documenting the structure and
usage. Details are in the PRI itself and the associated background
documents.

If you have comments for official UTC consideration, please post them by
submitting your comments through our feedback & reporting page:

http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html

If you wish to discuss issues on the Unicode mail list, then please
use the following link to subscribe (if necessary). Please be aware
that discussion comments on the Unicode mail list are not automatically
recorded as input to the UTC. You must use the reporting link above
to generate comments for UTC consideration.

http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html

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New Public Review Issues (UTS #46 data, and two others)

The Unicode Technical Committee has posted three new issues for public review and comment. Details are on the following web page:http://www.unicode.org/review/ Review periods for the new items close on August 2, 2010. Please see the page for links to discussion and relevant documents. Briefly, the new issues are:

169 Glyph Variation of Double Oblique Hyphen
171 Proposal to change properties of U+06DE ARABIC START OF RUB EL HIZB
172 Proposed Update UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing

The data for UTS #46 is being updated to synchronize with Unicode 6.0, and the UTC would like to get feedback on the data tables. Please see the text of the PRI for details.

If you have comments for official UTC consideration, please post them by submitting your comments through our feedback & reporting page: http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html If you wish to discuss issues on the Unicode mail list, then please use the following link to subscribe (if necessary). Please be aware that discussion comments on the Unicode mail list are not automatically recorded as input to the UTC. You must use the reporting link above to generate comments for UTC consideration. http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html

Unicode 6.0 Beta, including new support for mobile phones

Mountain View, CA, USA – June 2, 2010 – The Unicode® Consortium today announced the availability of the Unicode 6.0 beta. A smooth transition to each new version of the Unicode Standard is vital, because it is the foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, including all modern operating systems, browsers, and smartphones; modern web protocols (HTML, XML,...); and internationalized domain names.

Software developers and other experts are strongly encouraged to review the beta data files and documentation for Unicode 6.0 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 they will be ready for the release of Unicode 6.0 at the end of September.

A long-awaited new feature of Unicode 6.0 is the support of new characters for mobile phones. The emoji (pictographic) characters are in very widespread use, especially in Japan. They have distinct semantics, and are often substituted for related words. For the first time, there is a standard encoding for these characters that allows lossless interchange between different vendors. Unicode 6.0 also adds 222 new CJK unified ideographs in common use in China and Japan, and a number of other symbols and letters used by other languages.

• See http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ for the current draft summary.
• See http://unicode.org/versions/beta.html for more information about the beta.

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, DENIC eG, Google, Government of India, Government of West Bengal, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Oracle, SAP, Sybase, The University of California (Berkeley), The University of California (Santa Cruz), Yahoo!, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.