Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2

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/.

Monday, September 10, 2012

CLDR Version 22 Released


Mountain View, CA, Sept. 10, 2012  - The Unicode® Consortium announced today the release of a new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (Unicode CLDR 22.0), providing key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.

Unicode CLDR 22.0 contains data for 215 languages and 227 territories—654 locales in all. The main focus for this release is to flesh out data items in major languages and locales, yielding an increase of over 100% in the total number of data fields. Other major features include the addition of keyboard mapping data for different platforms, the new Zhuyin (Bopomofo) sort order for Chinese, and script metadata. There are also enhancements to compact decimals (such as formatting 1,000,000 as “1 million” or “1M”) for different languages and to rule-based number formats (such as writing 423 as "four hundred and twenty-three"). For more details, see the CLDR 22.0 Release Note.
CLDR is used to adapt software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones, numbers, and currency values; sorting text; choosing languages or countries by name; and transliterating different alphabets.

It is by far the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data, used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization. It is widely deployed via International Components for Unicode (ICU), and also accessed directly by companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, Twitter, and many others. 

CLDR is part of the Unicode locale data project, together with the Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML)—an XML format used for general interchange of locale data, such as in Microsoft's .NET. See the charts pages for views of the CLDR data, organized in various ways. For more information about the Unicode CLDR project see cldr.unicode.org.

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 Society for Natural Language Technology Research, 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.