Proposed Draft UTR #53, Unicode Arabic Mark Ordering Algorithm Now Available for Public Review

The Unicode Consortium has released Proposed Draft Unicode Technical Report #53, Unicode Arabic Mark Ordering Algorithm. This UTR describes an algorithm for determining correct rendering of Arabic combining mark sequences.

The combining classes of Arabic combining characters in Unicode are a mixture of special classes for specific marks plus two more generalized classes for all the other marks. For many years this has resulted in inconsistent rendering for sequences with multiple combining marks such as:

The algorithm described in this UTR provides a method to reorder Arabic combining marks in order to accomplish the following goals:

• The inside-out rendering rule will display combining marks in the expected visual order.
• Ensure identical display of canonically equivalent sequences.
• Provide a mechanism for overriding the display order in exceptional cases.

The document is in “Proposed Draft” state, and made available for public review and comment. Information about this type of document can be found on the About Unicode Technical Reports page.

For information about how to discuss this Public Review Issue and how to supply formal feedback, please see the PRI #359 page.

Unicode CLDR 32α available for testing

The alpha version of Unicode CLDR 32 is available for testing. The alpha period lasts until the beta release on September 27, which will include updates to the LDML spec. The final release is expected on October 19.

CLDR 32 provides an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

CLDR 32 included a Survey Tool data collection phase, with a resulting significant increase in data size, especially for emoji names/annotations and geographic subdivision names. Other enhancements include rule-based number formats for additional languages, a new “disjunctive” list style (a, b, or c), and fixes for Chinese collation and transliteration. The draft release page at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-32 lists the major features, and has pointers to the newest data and charts. It will be fleshed out over the coming weeks with more details, migration issues, known problems, and so on. Particularly useful for review are:

• Delta Charts - the data that changed during the release
• By-Type Charts - a side-by-side comparison of data from different locales
  
• Annotation Charts - new emoji names and keywords
• Territory Subdivisions
  

Please report any problems that you find using a CLDR ticket. We'd also appreciate it if programmatic users of CLDR data download the xml files and do a trial integration to see if any problems arise.