Making UTC Document Register Public

The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) is making its document register freely available for public access, starting on April 15, 2013. This decision has been taken in the interest of increasing public involvement in the ongoing deliberations of the UTC regarding the development of the Unicode Standard and the other standards and reports that it maintains. Open access to the document register will also make it easier to search the documents, both current and historical, for topics of interest, using widely available search engines. The UTC document register contains online documents dating back to 1997 and online registers for paper document distributions dating back to 1991.

The date for opening up access has been set to April 15 to provide sufficient time for anyone who might have issues concerning this change to raise their concerns to the Unicode Consortium. In particular, any author of a document which was submitted to the UTC under the old rules, with the assumption that the document would be available only to current members of the Consortium for review, who has concerns about that document being made publicly accessible, is encouraged to contact the Unicode Consortium. Please identify precisely the document of concern and the reasons why you might not wish for it to be included in the publicly accessible set. Please note that the change to make the document register publicly accessible does not change anything with regard to copyright status of existing documents – these documents are not being put in the public domain; rather, the UTC is simply removing the requirement for password access to view them.

Major changes to Unicode for Arabic & Hebrew

UAX #9, Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, will be updated for Unicode 6.3. The Unicode BIDI algorithm is used for displaying all Arabic and Hebrew text on the web and in application programs, so any changes require careful review.

This proposed update involves a substantial extension of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm to allow for the implementation of isolate runs. It also introduces new Bidi_Class property values and formatting characters in support of that extension.

There are also changes to Section 3.3.4 Resolving Neutral Types to resolve paired punctuation marks as a unit. This adds a new rule N0.

See the modifications section of the proposed update for information on specific changes to sections in the document.

The proposed update is available here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-28.html