Keynote Speaker Announced for IUC 40

My Life as a Higher Level Protocol

John Hudson

After sitting in on a full day of in depth tutorials, join us Wednesday morning as we kick off our 25th year with a keynote presentation by John Hudson, Co-Founder, Tiro Typeworks. John has spent two decades working at the messy interface between text encoding and typography, much of it making fonts for complex scripts. In his keynote presentation, he reflects on some of the messiest aspects of this work, and why, after twenty years, he's convinced that a holistic overview of text is necessary.

About IUC 40, November 1-3, 2016: For twenty-five years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Please join us for our 40th conference! This year's event is being held on November 1-3, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. Read more.

Proposed Update UTR #51, Unicode Emoji (Version 4.0)

A proposed update of UTR #51, Unicode Emoji (Version 4.0) is available for public review and feedback. This new version covers a total of 2,243 emoji, an increase from the 1,788 in Version 3.0.

There are several important changes in the proposed update. Three existing symbols have been newly classified as emoji: U+2640 FEMALE SIGN, U+2642 MALE SIGN, and U+2695 STAFF OF AESCULAPIUS. These are used in sequences to represent additional professions and to make gender distinctions among emoji. Many new emoji zwj sequences are cataloged, including professions and roles, gender distinctions, and new family groupings. Two new flag emoji have been added, one as an emoji zwj sequence and one as a regional indicator pair. Ten additional emoji characters are newly classified as emoji modifier bases. This results in 50 new emoji modifier sequences, displaying skin tone diversity. For example, see the emoji data for U+1F93C WRESTLERS.

Associated charts are available at http://unicode.org/emoji/charts-beta/index.html, and associated data files are available at http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/4.0/.

The review period for the proposed update ends on October 24, 2016. Feedback can be submitted through the online reporting form.