by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/09/27 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/09/27/10353657.aspx
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:
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!
Jeroen on 27 Sep 2012 7:33 AM:
Even though you won't be celebrating, happy birthday!
Doug Ewell on 27 Sep 2012 12:49 PM:
I wish the ₺ira sign ₺ined up a ₺itt₺e better with the digits in your screen shots.
cheong00 on 27 Sep 2012 8:12 PM:
First, I want to wish you a happy birthday. :)
And I'm curious that, maybe we have to wait a SP to get Unicode 6.2 supoort?
Will the GA version manage to have this built in?
Maximilian Haru Raditya on 30 Sep 2012 1:47 AM:
> Soon after Windows 8 reaches general availability, they'll *so* something about the down-level and other product world...
Perhaps it's "... they'll *do* something ..."
Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Sep 2012 1:15 PM:
Yes, *do* something....
Dylan on 4 Oct 2012 11:19 AM:
Well I'm glad the character got added but that is not a good codepoint for it. Calibri has a typo such that U+02BA, MODIFIER LETTER DOUBLE PRIME, is encoded as U+20BA. So now, while a few programs render U+20BA as an unknown glyph, most of them on my system grab the Calibri symbol and render it like a quotation mark.
U+20BA: ₺
U+02BA: ʺ
Michael S. Kaplan on 4 Oct 2012 4:38 PM:
I don't know what kind of machine you are on, or what font version, but I don't see this problem with Calibri....
Doug Ewell on 8 Oct 2012 2:23 PM:
@Dylan: Son of a gun, I do see the Calibri problem. Version 5.62 running on Win 7 64-bit. U+02BA is a .notdef while U+20BA is the double prime.
But that doesn't make U+20BA "not a good codepoint" for a new currency symbol. It highlights a font bug that would have been less noticeable otherwise, but that isn't Unicode's fault.
Ottmar Freudenberger on 9 Oct 2012 2:59 PM:
That's related to KB2739286 for Windows 7, relased today via Download Center, true? Since the relating MSKB article isn't available yet, looking into the contained update files I came to that conclusion. Does the update replace the "Rupie" update KB2496898? ;-)
Bye,
Freudi
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