Unicode Emoji 13.0 — Now final for 2020

The Emoji 13.0 are now final, with 62 new emoji such as:

Smiling face with tear	Polar bear
Bubble tea	Pickup truck
Fondue	Teapot
Piñata	Transgender flag

There are also 55 gender and skin-tone variants, including new gender-inclusive emoji. See the seven cases in boxes below:

The new emoji are listed in Emoji Recently Added v13.0, with sample images. These images are just samples: vendors for mobile phones, PCs, and web platforms will typically use different images. In particular, the Emoji Ordering v13.0 chart shows how the new emoji sort compared to the others, with new emoji marked with rounded-rectangles. The other Emoji Charts for Version 13.0. have been updated to show the emoji.

The new emoji typically start showing up on mobile phones in September/October — some platforms may release them earlier. The new emoji will soon be available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

For implementers:

1. The Emoji 13.0 test file (emoji-test.txt) provides data for vendors to begin working on their emoji fonts and code ahead of the release of Unicode 13.0, scheduled for March 10.
2. The emoji specification (UTS #51) will have additional guidelines on gender and skin tone, and other clarifications. The definitions in UTS #51 and data files have been enhanced to be more consistent and useful. The final text will be available on March 10.
3. The CLDR names and search keywords for the new emoji in over 80 languages, and the sort order for emoji, will be finalized by mid-April with the release of CLDR v37.

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Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Unicode Maya Hieroglyph Project

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced their grants for 2020 to support 188 humanities projects across the United States. The Unicode Consortium's project to make Maya texts accessible to both expert and non-expert user communities through creating an annotated digital archive is one of the funded projects. This project will be led by principal investigator, Gabrielle Vail.

The NEH announcement included mention of the grant to the Unicode Consortium: "Another grant will augment the international Unicode computer text encoding standards to digitally render additional historical and modern scripts, including Mayan ... hieroglyphs."

Thousands of texts written in a hieroglyphic script by prehispanic Maya cultures have been preserved throughout the Maya lowlands, in museums, and in private collections. Various media were used, including painting, carving, and incising. Texts can be found on large-scale stone monuments, the walls of buildings, painted polychrome vessels, codices made from fig-bark paper, and small objects made from stone, bone, and wood. The project will focus on building a digital archive to include texts from Classic period monumental sites. These Classic period texts are most often of a dynastic or political nature.

The Unicode Maya project will advance research on Classic period sites circa 250-900 CE (Common Era) to determine the sign repertoire or character list, a list of quadrats (specific configurations that can be arranged and combined to form a glyphic cartouche or block), a glossary of attested terms from the Classic period, a lexicon mapping of Classic period terms to the Colonial period and modern Mayan dictionaries, and finally, the creation of OpenType fonts.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of Tamil Nadu, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Oracle, SAP, Tamil Virtual University, The University of California (Berkeley), plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For a complete member list go to https://home.unicode.org/membership/members/.

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Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Call for Participation Announced for IUC 44

The IUC 44 Program Committee invites you to submit your session, tutorial, or panel abstracts for the 44th Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC 44) in Santa Clara, California, October 14-16, 2020.

Join other industry leaders as they map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas, and showcase the latest technologies and best practices for creating, managing, and testing global, web, and multilingual software solutions. Be a leader. Direct the future of multilingual text and software internationalization!

Submission types could include case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards, to name a few. In addition, understanding the design of a development platform is often critical to implementing best practices in applications. The Internationalization and Unicode Conference seeks to offer technical tutorials on the internationalization capabilities and architecture of development platforms, including Mobile, Desktop, Cloud, and Virtual Operating Systems, Social Network Platforms, and Machine Translation and Machine Learning Systems.

Please submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials by Friday, March 6, 2020.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, April 3, 2020. Speaker agreements and materials such as photos, bios and final presentation abstracts will be required from selected presenters by Friday, April 17, 2020.

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

Please visit our website to view examples of content from past conferences.

About The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode®Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Oracle, SAP, Tamil Virtual University, The University of California (Berkeley), plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.

About the Event Producer

OMG® is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG's modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries. OMG has offices at 109 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA 02494 USA. This email may be considered to be commercial email, an advertisement or a solicitation.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at https://www.omg.org.

New Unicode Working Group: Message Formatting

One of the challenges in adapting programs to work with different languages is message formatting. This is the process of formatting and inserting data values into messages in the user’s language. For example, “The package will arrive at {time} on {date}” could be translated into German as “Das Paket wird am {date} um {time} geliefert”, and the particular {time} and {date} variables would be automatically formatted for German, and inserted in the right places.

The Unicode Consortium has provided message formatting for some time via the ICU programming libraries and CLDR locale data repository. But until now we have not had a syntax for localizable message strings standardized by Unicode. Furthermore, the current ICU MessageFormat is relatively complex for existing operations, such as plural forms, and it does not scale well to other language properties, such as gender and inflections.

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is formalizing a new working group to develop a technical specification for message format that addresses these issues. That working group is called the Message Format Working Group and is chaired by Romulo Cintra from CaixaBank. Other participants currently represented are Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, IBM, Mozilla, OpenJSF, and Paypal.

For information on how to get involved, visit the working group’s GitHub page: https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg

Open discussions will take place on GitHub, and written notes will be posted after every meeting.

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Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

New Unicode Technical Director

The Unicode Consortium would like to welcome a new Technical Director, Roozbeh Pournader.

Roozbeh Pournader has been working on internationalization, standardization, open source software, and digital typography since 1994, when he was in high school, where he also participated in scientific olympiads and received several medals, including the Gold Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, 1996.

He started his internationalization career by adding Persian support to Donald Knuth’s typesetting system, TeX. Later, while studying Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, he founded the FarsiWeb Project that introduced and evangelized internationalization, Unicode, and open source in Iran. At FarsiWeb, Roozbeh led the development of two national Iranian standards, on information interchange (ISIRI 6219) and keyboard input (ISIRI 9147), which helped transition Persian users from old character sets to Unicode. To this day, FarsiWeb alumni, trained by Roozbeh, continue to work in the internationalization field at major tech companies.

Roozbeh founded the Persian Wikipedia in 2003 and received the Unicode Bulldog award in 2009 for his contributions to Unicode and CLDR’s support for complex scripts. Since moving to the United States, he has worked as an Internationalization Engineer at HighTech Passport, Google (working on Noto fonts, bidirectional support, Android internationalization, and Google Fonts), and Facebook. He has been WhatsApp’s Internationalization Lead at Facebook from early 2018.

Roozbeh has been formally representing various organizations to the Unicode Consortium, including High Council of Informatics (2000–2008), HighTech Passport (2009–2011), Google (2011–2018), and Facebook (2018–present). He is also the Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.

For the listing of current directors and officers of the Consortium please see Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff