Call for Unicode 14.0 Cover Design Art

The Unicode Consortium is inviting artists and designers to submit cover design proposals for Version 14.0 of The Unicode Standard, scheduled for publications in September 2021.

The selected cover design will appear on the Unicode Standard 14.0 web pages, in the print-on-demand publications, and in associated promotional literature on the Unicode website. The artist whose design is selected for the cover will receive full credit in the colophon of the publication for which the art is used, and wherever else the design appears, and will receive $700. Two selected runner-up artists will receive $150 apiece.

Please see the announcement web page for requirements and more details.

Now Accepting Unicode Emoji Proposals 🎉

When you last heard from the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in April of 2020, the Unicode Consortium had just announced a 6-month delay to Unicode Version 14.0 due to COVID-19. Despite all of this :waves at the world: we’ve been busy.

What’s new? Great question!

During this pause in proposal submissions, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee consulted with experts, developing a process that more completely reflects our criteria for inclusion in an effort to prioritize globally relevant emoji. We’ve looked for new ways to reconcile the rapid, transient nature of modern communication with the formal, methodical process required by a standards body like the Unicode Consortium.

Moving forward, the proposal review season will be open each year from April 15-August 31. To submit a proposal, first read these Guidelines and fill out this form.

Thanks to all our Unicode Emoji Subcommittee volunteers who made these improvements possible. The world would be without emoji if it weren’t for you!

Looking forward to 2021!
The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

ICU 69 Released

Unicode® ICU 69 has just been released. ICU 69 incorporates updates to CLDR 39 locale data with its many additions and corrections. ICU 69 also includes significant improvements to formatting for measurement units and numbers, as well as many other bug fixes and enhancements.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details, please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/69.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Unicode CLDR Version 39 now available

Unicode CLDR version 39 is now available. Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems (including all mobile phones) for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages.

The scope of the data changes is small in this cycle, because there was no data submission phase. Instead the focus was on modernizing the Survey Tool software and preparing for data submission in the next release (v40). The data fixes in the release were confined to some global changes that are difficult to do during a submission cycle, and various other fixes.

However, there were some changes that could require implementations to adapt their code:

• There was a major change in how Norwegian is handled, in order to align the way that the language identifiers no, nb, and nn are used.
• The unit support from the last release was integrated into ICU, and some fixes resulting from that process were made to the measurement unit data.
• Quite a number of fixes are made to the specification, to clarify text or fix problems in keyboards, measurement units, locale identifiers, and a few other areas.

To find out more, see the CLDR 39 Release Note, which has details on accessing the data, charts of the changes, and necessary migration changes.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages