BabelStone Blog

Sunday, 27 April 2008

What's new in Unicode 5.2 ?

Previously discussed :

[2009-10-01 : Unicode 5.2 has now been released (Unicode Code Charts, BabelMap)]

As most of us are still trying to get to grips with Unicode 5.1, which was only released three weeks ago, it may seem a little premature to start talking about Unicode 5.2, but I'm blogging about it early this time because 5.2 promises to a very important release of Unicode, with 12,799 6,648 new characters and a record 16 15 new scripts, including the long awaited CJK Extension-C (4,149 characters) and major historical scripts such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs (1,071 characters) and Tangut (5,910 characters), as well as the famous woman's writing of southern China (Tangut and Nüshu were originally in Amd.6, but have since been removed for further study, and will not now be encoded until Unicode 6.0 at the earliest).

[This blog post has been updated several times since first published on 2008-04-27. The most recent update on 2009-08-10 reflects the final repertoires of ISO/IEC 10646:2003 Amdendments 5 and 6, which will be identical to the contents of Unicode 5.2 (Unicode 5.2 Code Charts).]

Unicode 5.2 will correspond to Amendments 5 and 6 of ISO/IEC 10646: 2003 (see Unicode Liaison Report for WG 2 meeting 52). Both these amendments have now completed their two rounds of technical balloting, and so no more changes will be made to their character repertoire. It is anticipated that Unicode 5.2 will be released at the end of September 2009 (which incidentally will be the first autumnal release of a new Unicode version since 3.0 in September 1999).


Amendment 5 (5,611 characters)

Amendment 5 has now been published (December 2008), and can be downloaded for free from the ISO Publicly Available Standards site.


New Scripts


Other New Blocks


Additions to Existing Blocks


Glyph Changes

Amendment 5 will also introduce changes to the representative glyph shape used in the code charts for the following characters (the new glyphs are given in N3465) :


Amendment 6 (1,037 characters)

Amendment 6 has now completed its two rounds or technical balloting (PDAM and FPDAM ballots), and after it has completed its final FDAM ballot it will be published. No more technical changes can now be made to the character repertoire, and so the character names and code points in the Amd.6 Code Charts can be relied on.


New Scripts


Other New Blocks


Additions to Existing Blocks


Unicode 5.2 Fonts

The following are some free or shareware fonts that include some of the characters added in Unicode 5.2:


On Beyond Unicode 5.2


Tags:

Unicode

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