Subject: PWG-ANNOUNCE> Fwd: FYI: Unicode 5.1 Released

From: "Ira McDonald" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 13:43:24 -0400

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick McGowan <[email-masked]>
 Date: Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 3:54 PM
Subject: Unicode 5.1 Released
To: [email-masked]

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce the release of Unicode 5.1.
 This release contains over 100,000 characters, and provides significant
 additions and improvements that extend text processing for software
 worldwide. Some of the key features are: increased security in data
 exchange, significant character additions for Indic and South East Asian
 scripts, expanded identifier specifications for Indic and Arabic scripts,
 improvements in the processing of Tamil and other Indic scripts,
 linebreaking conformance relaxation for HTML and other protocols,
 strengthened normalization stability, new case pair stability,
 plus others given below.

 The Version 5.1.0 data files and documentation are final and posted on the
 Unicode site. In addition to updated existing files, implementers will
 find new test data files (for example, for linebreaking) and new XML data
 files that encapsulate all of the Unicode character properties. For
 details, see the page for Unicode 5.1.0 at
 http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/.

 A major feature of Unicode 5.1.0 is the enabling of ideographic variation
 sequences. These sequences allow standardized representation of glyphic
 variants needed for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean text. The first
 registered collection, from Adobe Systems, is now available at
 http://www.unicode.org/ivd/.

 Unicode 5.1 contains significant changes to properties and behaviorial
 specifications. Several important property definitions were extended,
 improving linebreaking for Polish and Portuguese hyphenation. The Unicode
 Text Segmentation Algorithms, covering sentences, words, and characters,
 were greatly enhanced to improve the processing of Tamil and other Indic
 languages. The Unicode Normalization Algorithm now defines stabilized
 strings and provides guidelines for buffering. Standardized named sequences
 are added for Lithuanian, and provisional named sequences for Tamil.

 Unicode 5.1.0 adds 1,624 newly encoded characters. These additions include
 characters required for Malayalam and Myanmar and important individual
 characters such as Latin capital sharp s for German. Version 5.1 extends
 support for languages in Africa, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam,
 with the addition of the Cham, Lepcha, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra,
 Sundanese, and Vai scripts. Scholarly support includes important editorial
 punctuation marks, as well as the Carian, Lycian, and Lydian scripts, and
 the Phaistos disc symbols. Other new symbol sets include dominoes, Mahjong,
 dictionary punctuation marks, and math additions. This latest version of
 the Unicode Standard has exactly the same character assignments as ISO/IEC
 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1 through 4.

 The Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA), the core standard for sorting all
 text, is also being updated at the same time (see
 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/). The major changes in UCA include
 coverage of all Unicode 5.1 characters, tightened conformance for canonical
 equivalence, clearer definitions of internationalized search and matching,
 specifications of parameters for customizing collation, and definitions of
 collation folding. There are also important clarifications on the use of
 contractions (such as "ch" in Slovak) in collation.

 The next version of the Unicode locale project (CLDR) is also being
 prepared on the basis of Unicode 5.1, and is now open for public data
 submission (see http://www.unicode.org/cldr/).