Draft UTR #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout

Draft UTR #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout is now available for public review and comment. The main changes in this version from the previous proposed draft:

• The intended interaction with document formats has been clarified.
• The guidelines for the assignment of a property value have been clarified.
• A number of characters have been assigned a different property value. 

Proposed Update UTS #18, Unicode Regular Expressions

UTS #18, Unicode Regular Expressions, is being updated to bring it into alignment with Unicode 6.3. Two new bidi-related properties introduced in Unicode 6.3 for the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm are being added. In addition, the discussion of script extensions is being extended and clarified.

The proposed update document is now available for review and comment. See Public Review Issue #252.

Membership Fee Changes

The Unicode Consortium is announcing an increase in the Full membership fee. As of June 1, 2013, the annual Full membership fee will increase from $15,000  to $18,000. This fee increase will enable the Consortium to continue its mission to enable people around the world to use computers in any language by providing freely-available specifications and data.

The Consortium has also added a multi-year discount option for all membership levels. Effective June 1, 2013, any member may pay fees in advance to receive the following discounts:

      10 years,  20% discount
      5 years,  10% discount
      3 years,  6% discount

For further information please contact the Unicode office.

Unicode CLDR 24 Survey Tool Beta

April 15, 2013 — The Unicode CLDR Survey Tool is open for beta testing today. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. The survey tool is an online tool used by organizations and individuals to contribute data to this repository, and to vote on alternative contributions.

The survey tool has again undergone substantial revision, with dramatic improvements in usability. We would appreciate people trying out the tool so that we can identify any remaining problems before we start data submission for CLDR 24 on April 24th.

For more information, including how to login, try it out, and supply feedback, see Survey Tool Beta.

UTC Document Register Now Public

The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) document register is now freely available for public access. This change has been made to increase public involvement in the ongoing deliberations of the UTC in its work developing and maintaining the Unicode Standard and other related standards and reports. Open access to the document register makes it easier to search both current and historical documents 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.
http://www.unicode.org/L2/all-docs.html