Friday, January 6, 2012

Release candidate for Unicode 6.1 character data

Because Unicode is at the foundation of all modern software using text, it is important to verify that problems are not introduced with new versions. If your implementation uses Unicode data, please download and test the final release candidate of the Unicode 6.1 data (UCD) with your implementation now. Please note that the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) and the Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing are correlated with version 6.1; if you have an implementation of them, please check the data below as well.

That data can be found in:
  1. Unicode
    1. http://unicode.org/Public/6.1.0/ucd/ (data, semicolon-delimited)
    2. http://unicode.org/Public/6.1.0/ucdxml/ (data, xml)
    3. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/proposed.html (documentation)
  2. UCA
    1. http://unicode.org/Public/UCA/6.1.0/ (data)
    2. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/proposed.html (documentation)
  3. IDNA compatibility
    1. http://unicode.org/Public/idna/6.1.0/ (data)
    2. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr46/proposed.html (documentation)
For more information, see http://unicode.org/versions/beta.html.
Note that at this point in the process, no substantive changes can be made unless:
  1. a problem is found in carrying out the actions directed by the Unicode Technical Committee for the release, or
  2. an editorial problem is found in the data comments or documentation.
The Unicode Consortium is planning to move up the release date of Unicode 6.1 (UCD and UAXes) to January instead of February, so any final comments should be made by January 6th. You can send your comments using the Contact Form (http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html).

The draft code charts for Unicode 6.1 have also been updated. We encourage users to check the code charts carefully to verify correctness of the new characters added to Unicode 6.1 and to ensure that there are no regressions in glyph shapes for previously encoded characters. For links to the charts, see http://unicode.org/versions/beta.html.