From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Oct 09 2006 - 18:58:18 CST
Well, the Tokyo WG2 meeting was a little over a week ago (September 25-29), so it's time to bring the UTC up to speed on what took place there.
For the formal resolutions, you can take a look at:
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3154.doc
I'll summarize what happened from the point of view of the UTC.
1. Amendment Progression in General
WG2 decided to progress Amendment 3 to its FPDAM ballot, after completion of the disposition of comments on its second PDAM ballot.
WG2 also started a new Amendment 4, which will be up for its PDAM ballot during the same time period.
These ballots will be issued toward the end of November or early December, and both will be closing around the end of next March.
2. Amendment 3
All the negative ballot votes were turned to positive during the Disposition of Comments.
Everything that the UTC asked for in the way of additions to Amendment 3 was accomodated. There were some other additions that the UTC will have to review, but they are limited in number. I'll provide full details for review in a WG2 Consent Docket document for the UTC. At this point Amendment 3 contains 1159 new characters.
The draft of the charts for FPDAM 3 can be viewed here:
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3173.pdf
3. Amendment 4
Amendment 4 was started primarily to accomodate the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, which was finally completed by the IRG and is ready for ballot. That is 4219 new Han characters right there.
Additional newly approved scripts were added to Amendment 4: Cham, which the UTC has already reviewed and approved, and Lanna, which it has not.
Also, some other medium-sized repertoires of letters or symbols which had some controversy involved, and which could use two rounds of technical review and ballotting, were added to Amendment 4 instead of Amendment 3.
As of now, the draft for Amendment 4 contains 4219 Han characters and 386 non-Han characters, in the following subgroups:
* the 6 Malayalam chillu characters * 39 more Myanmar extensions for Karen, Shan, etc. * the Lanna script * the Cham script * 22 Old Church Slavonic combining characters * the 11 Ancient Roman weights, measures, and coin symbols * a passle of game symbols, consisting of: - 44 Mahjong tile symbols - 100 domino tile symbols - 4 draughts (checkers) symbolsThe draft of the charts for PDAM 4 can be viewed here:
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3176.pdf
4. Hangul Issues
As for every recent WG2 meeting, there was a continuing discussion about Hangul issues. This meeting had new input, but still came to no acceptable conclusion regarding the possible updating of Clause 26.1 in 10646. Nothing was agreed upon for ballotting, and everybody was sent away to "continue their discussions". The issue continues to wash up on the rocks as implementers insist on the need to maintain stability for existing implementations, while the ROK NB keeps trying to make more jamo additions for Old Korean and to institute spelling rules for Hangul that would require all syllables to be spelled with exactly 3 jamos.
5. Free Availability of 10646 and 14651
The ISO Council finally got around to approving free availability of both 10646 and 14651 on the web. They are on the list noted in:
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3175.pdf
Note that only the published standards are freely available, however, and the amendments are not yet included, so this situation, while improved, is not yet ideal as regards standards availability.
6. Progression of 14651
The Sort-OWG that is maintaining 14651 met during the week of the WG2 meeting. It successfully resolved the Disposition of Comments on the CD ballot that will be including the table updated to synchronize with UCA 5.0. An FCD ballot will be sent out with a closing date probably in March 2007, so that it can be dealt with during the Frankfurt WG2 meeting in April, 2007.
From the UTC's point of view, the important thing to note is that the CTT table in the FCD does not diverge from the UCA 5.0 table, so the two standards will stay in synch. The text of 14651 also got a number of editorial improvements based on a very close reading by the UK NB.
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Let me know if there are particular issues that anybody would like more clarification on. As I said, I'll be sending around a WG2 Consent Docket document for UTC review that will contain all the explicit details about the new repertoire included in FPDAM3 or PDAM4 for which the UTC has not yet determined a position.
--Ken