Announcing the Unicode Standard, Version 6.1

*Mountain View, January 31, 2012*. The Unicode Consortium announces the
release of Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard, continuing Unicode's
long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around
the world. This latest version adds characters to support additional
languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa. It also addresses
educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new
characters have been added. For full details, see
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/.

This version of the Standard also brings technical improvements to
support implementers. Improved changes to property values and their
aliases mean that properties now have easy-to-specify labels. The new
labels combined with a new script extensions property means that regular
expressions can be more straightforward and are easier to validate.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for
/emoji/ characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred
display styles between text and /emoji/ styles. For example:

26FA FE0E U+26FA+U+FE0E/ TENT text style
26FA FE0F U+26FA+U+FE0F/ TENT emoji style
26FD FE0E U+26FD+U+FE0E/ FUEL PUMP text style
26FD FE0F U+26FD+U+FE0F/ FUEL PUMP emoji style

Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two
new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior
of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for
Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony
with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will
be finalized in February:

    * UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
    * UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing
    *

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