SC22/WG20 N1005

Title:  Liaison Report from Unicode Consortium
Source: Unicode Technical Committee
Author: Ken Whistler
Date:   February 6, 2003
Action: For Information


The Unicode Technical Committee would like to inform
SC22/WG20 regarding a number of its current activities which
may be of interest to SC22/WG20 participants.

1. Most important is the imminent release of the Unicode
Standard, Version 4.0. The repertoire for Unicode 4.0 has
been decided, based on the final results of the SC2/WG2
meeting, December, 2002 in Tokyo. Currently, the final
data files to accompany the Unicode 4.0 release are being
actively worked on. A beta period for review and feedback
on those data files should start during the week of
February 10, and will continue to about the end of March,
2003. Shortly after that, probably in the first weeks
of April, the data files will be frozen and locked down,
and Unicode 4.0 will be officially announced on the
Unicode website. Unicode 4.0 will be code-for-code
identical to the planned publication of ISO/IEC 10646:2003.
The data files contain character property assignments for
all of the 1226 additional characters in the standard,
including a few new case mapping assignments.

2. The publication of the actual book, The Unicode Standard,
Version 4.0, is also approaching its final stages. The book
will go into copy edit about the time that the release of
Unicode 4.0 is announced, and the editors anticipate that the
publication will be available for purchase in late August
or early September, 2003.

3. Future meeting schedule. The following meetings of
the Unicode Technical Committee are scheduled:

   March 4-7, 2003, Mountain View, California
   June 3-6, 2003, San Jose, California
   August 19-22, Pleasanton, California
   November 4-7, 2003, location TBD (possibly Baltimore, Maryland)
   
4. UTC members have been engaging in a dialogue with some
SC22 language committee participants about issues of data
type support for UTF-16 in computer languages and issues
of identifier definition. An ad hoc discussion on these topic
was held in conjunction with the SC22 plenary last August
in Finland.

5. In connection with Item #4, the implementation guidelines
for Identifiers which will be published in The Unicode
Standard, Version 4.0, have incorporated some suggestions
which came out of the SC22 discussions, as well as
considerations coming out of W3C requirements for
identifiers.

6. The UTC has decided that its next revision of the
Unicode Collation Algorithm should account for the entire
repertoire of Unicode 4.0. Draft tables for that repertoire
are due in March (although this due date may have to slip).
And the UTC will be providing those tables to WG20 and
the editor of ISO 14651 as well, as a starting point for
trying to progress both the UCA and ISO 14651, so that
their tables can stay in synch with each other and with
the new publications, Unicode 4.0 and ISO/IEC 10646:2003.

7. Please note and respond to the outstanding public review issues 
found at:  http://www.unicode.org/review/