IUC 42 Call for Participation Announced!

The IUC 42 Program Committee invites you to submit your session, tutorial, or panel abstracts for the 42nd Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 42) in Santa Clara, California, September 10-12, 2018.

Join other industry leaders as they map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas, and showcase the latest technologies and best practices for creating, managing, and testing global, web, and multilingual software solutions. Let imagination be your only limit!

Please submit a brief abstract by the deadline of Friday, March 9, 2018.

The Program Committee will notify authors by April 13, 2018. Speaker agreements and materials such as photos, bios and final presentation abstracts will be required from selected presenters by Friday, April 27, 2018

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

Please visit the conference website to view examples of content from past conferences.

Unicode LDML Keyboard Enhancements

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is planning to enhance the Unicode LDML keyboard specifications. The goal is to be able to represent all the keyboard features necessary to support keyboard layouts from all major providers, allowing the CLDR repository of keyboard layouts to support not only languages in widespread use, but also digitally disadvantaged languages.  As a part of this work, keyboards add support for more complex scripts, add capabilities for virtual keyboards (especially mobile phones), incorporate features needed on specific platforms, and provide better layouts overall. Keyboards would also be able to import files, reducing maintenance by allowing common features to be shared. For complex scripts, the transform elements are made more powerful, and reorder and backspace transforms are added.

The plan is to incorporate the changes specified in the PRI #367 background document into CLDR v33 (ca. March 2018), and to work thereafter to improve the tooling for the new specification, and streamline the process for submitting new keyboards into CLDR.

The committee is soliciting feedback on the proposal so that it can make any necessary improvements. The closing date for providing feedback is February 1, 2018.

Please see the PRI #367 page for complete details.

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

New version of Unicode Ideographic Variation Database released

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the release of the 2017-12-12 version of the Unicode Ideographic Variation Database (IVD), which is the sixth version, and includes five registered collections. This version registers the new KRName collection and the first 36 sequences in that collection, four additional sequences in the registered Adobe-Japan1 collection, and 674 additional sequences in the registered Moji_Joho collection. Details can be found on the main IVD page.

Feedback on Draft additional repertoire for ISO/IEC 10646:2017 (5th edition) DAM1 and PDAM2.2

The Unicode Technical Committee is soliciting feedback on pending additions to the draft repertoire of characters, to help discover any errors in character names, incorrect glyphs, or other problems. There is a short window of opportunity to review and comment on the repertoire additions noted below.

The following additional repertoires from ISO/IEC 10646:2017 (5th Edition), which are in ballot, and are under review. See the associated repertoires in: Draft additional repertoire for ISO/IEC 10646:2017 (5th edition) DAM1 [PRI #366] and PDAM 2.2 [PRI #365].

The Unicode Standard is developed in synchrony with ISO/IEC 10646. Note that for DAM1, no further changes or corrections will be possible after ISO balloting is completed. Comments the PDAM 2.2 repertoire can be made on later ballots. (See the FAQ Standards Developing Organizations for additional information on the stages in ISO standards development.) Advance feedback on these repertoire additions will help inform the UTC discussions about its own contribution to the ISO balloting process.

Documents referenced in the draft repertoire with numbers such as L2/17-372 (DAM1) and L2/17-366 (PDAM 2.2) are available in the UTC Document Registry.

For information about how to discuss these Public Review Issues and how to supply formal feedback, please see the feedback and discussion instructions.

Support Unicode with an Adopt-a-Character Gift this Holiday Season!

This holiday season you can give a unique gift by adopting any emoji, letter, or symbol — and help support the Unicode Consortium’s mission to enable all languages to be used on computers. Three levels of sponsorship are available​, starting at $100. With over 130,000 characters to choose from, you are certain to find an appropriate character, for even the most demanding recipient. All sponsors will receive a custom digital badge featuring the adopted character for use on the web and elsewhere. Sponsors at the two highest levels will receive a special thank-you gift engraved with the name you supply and the adopted character.

The program funds work on “digitally disadvantaged” languages, both modern and historic. In 2017 the program awarded grants to support work on Mayan hieroglyphs and historic Indic scripts, among others.

To date, the Adopt-a-Character program has had over 500 sponsors. Be part of the next wave, with a worthwhile gift!

For more information on the program, or to adopt a character, see the Adopt-a-Character Page.

Unicode Emoji 11.0 Beta

Emoji 11.0 beta is now available for developers, with 130 Draft Candidates, such as:

The list is not final: changes can include removals or additions: for example, new ZWJ sequences could be added. The decisions of the 2017Q4 UTC meeting for emoji have been incorporated into the draft Charts, Specification, and Data, and are now available for testing and feedback. The contents will be finalized in 2018Q1. The following are the expected dates for 2018.

Emoji Set	Decision date	Announcement of final list	Market availability
Draft Emoji Candidates (2018)	2018-01	2018-03	2018H2

The version number for the next release of Unicode emoji is jumping from the previously-released Emoji 5.0 to Emoji 11.0 (instead of 6.0). This is due to alignment of the emoji versions in 2018 and beyond with the versions of the Unicode Standard.

The draft emoji 11.0β Charts now show the candidates in context: for example, Emoji Ordering, v11.0β shows the sorting of all the emoji, with the candidates highlighted with rounded-rectangles. Feedback on the sort-order, categories, names, and keywords is welcome.

The draft 11.0β Specification has a number of changes, including proposed guidelines for display, handling gender, handling skin tone, and a proposed mechanism for allowing emoji to point either to the right or left.

The draft 11.0β Emoji Data provides property data, which determines how implementations handle the new characters.

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

CLDR Version 32 Released

Unicode CLDR 32 provides an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world’s languages. This data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

Some of the improvements in the release are:

• More complete data
  
  • Major contributions of main locale data for Chakma (ccp), Sindhi (sd), Odia (or), Kabyle (kab), Pashto (ps), Turkmen (tk), Norwegian Nynorsk (nn), Assamese (as), and others.
  • Rule-based number formats for Indian English, Akan, Hindi (oblique), Cherokee; revisions to some others.
  • Import of draft subdivision names and language groups from wikidata.
• New data types
  
  • Numeric exemplars. For example, in zh: [\- , . % ‰ + 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 〇 一 七 三 九 二 五 八 六 四]
  • “Disjunctive” list style (eg “a, b, or c”)
  • AvailableFormats items for day periods (skeleton “Bhm” → pattern “h:mm B” → “1:30 in the afternoon”)
• Major additions for Emoji
  
  • Emoji name and keyword updates for Unicode 10 and Emoji 5.0 (minor updates for English, full data collection for other languages). Keywords now in sorted order.
  • Adjustments to emoji collation

For further details and links to documentation, see the CLDR Release Notes.

ICU 60 Released

Unicode® ICU 60 has just been released! 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 encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

ICU 60 upgrades to Unicode 10 and CLDR 32, and ICU4J has been tested with Java 9. ICU 60 includes a new API for number formatting. There are many more features and bug fixes.

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/60