The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote software globalisation, has announced the release of the latest version of the Unicode Standard, Version 4.1.0.
This version of the Unicode Standard adds 1,273 new characters, including those necessary to complete roundtrip mapping of the HKSCS and GB 18030 standards, five new currency signs, some characters for Indic and Korean, and eight new scripts.
In addition, there have been a number of significant additions and changes to the Unicode Character Database properties, which determine the behaviour of characters in modern software.
Unicode 4.1 adds two new Unicode Standard Annexes: UAX 31: Identifier and Pattern Syntax and UAX 34: Unicode Named Character Sequences, and makes significant changes to other Unicode Standard Annexes.
According to the consortium, the release of Unicode 4.1 will be soon followed by a new release of the Unicode Collation Algorithm, for language-sensitive sorting, searching, and matching; by Unicode Regular Expressions, setting the standard for handling Unicode character in regular expressions; and by a new draft of Unicode Security Considerations, for dealing with security issues posed by the large number of visually-similar characters in Unicode.
The Unicode Standard is a fundamental component of all modern software and information technology protocols. It provides a uniform, universal architecture and encoding for all languages of the world -- with over 96,000 characters currently encoded -- and is the basis for processing, storage, and seamless data interchange of text data worldwide.
|