Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 (and a little about what MS is doing about it)

Today is my birthday.

i don't particularly care for my birthday, and I'll not be celebrating it or anything....

Something much cooler happened yesterday.

Today's blog is gonna focus on that!

Unicode 6.2 was released!

{cue gratuitous graphic}

From the official Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 announcement:

Version 6.2 of the Unicode Standard is now available. This version adds only a single character, the newly adopted Turkish Lira sign; however, the properties and behaviors for many other characters have been adjusted. Emoji and pictographic symbols now have significantly improved line-breaking, word-breaking and grapheme cluster behaviors. The script categorizations for some characters are improved and better documented.
 
The Unicode Collation Algorithm has been greatly enhanced for Version 6.2, with a major overhaul of its documentation. There have also been significant changes to the collation weight tables, including improved handling of tertiary weights for characters with decompositions, and changed weights for some pictographic symbols.
 
The newly encoded Turkish Lira sign, like other currency symbols, is expected to be heavily used in its target environment. The Unicode Consortium accelerated the release of Unicode 6.2, to accommodate the urgent need for this character.
 
For more details of this release, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/.

Now I have talked about this character before,in blogs like Not the Lira or the New Lira, but a New Turkish Lira, nevertheless on March 14th of this year, and Every character has a story #39: U+20ba, aka TURKISH LIRA SIGN (coming soon to Turkey near you!) less than two months later.

And it is now in Unicode.

It will be in Windows Phone 8!

It is also in Windows 8!

You can see it in Regional Options:

You can see it right here in Segoe UI in Character Map:

You'll note it is undefined...

Well, perhaps this one bit of UI not being updated when everything else (collation, properties, locale data, character properties) has been updated is not really such a big deal.

I mean, the same thing happened with Windows 7 and the Rupee after the update:

which was added for Windows 8:

Soon after Windows 8 reaches general availability, they'll so something about the down-level and other product world, too (more on this when I have more to share!).

A lot of this will be coming up in my Show Me the Money! talk at the 36th Internationalization and Unicode conference on October 24th in Santa Clara that I talked about previously, here.

For Unicode version, this update expands my previous The oft-repeated 'What version of Unicode do we/will me support?' question, Redux where I said last February in the blog and in comments:

There is obviously time prior to ship yet after Unicode 6.1 was released that in theory might change that story slightly, though given the complexity of doing more work, I suspect that Windows 8 will largely be centered on 6.0, not 6.1.

Some specifics:

• NLS default collation supports all BMP characters defined in Unicode 6.0. Locale-specific collation for East Asian locales supports all EA characters in Unicode 6.0, including CJK Extensions C and D.
• NLS case mapping functions are updated with default case mappings for all characters in Unicode 6.0.
• IDN support functions are updated for all characters in Unicode 6.0 (and, also, for IDNA 2008 + UTS#46)
• Line-breaking behaviour in GDI/Uniscribe and DirectWrite are updated with character data for all Unicode 6.0 characters.

 There are a few 6.1 characters that leaked into Windows 8 into fonts and keyboards.

But that is a topic for another day.

In another blog!