L2/05-160 From: John H. Jenkins Date: 2005-05-26 Subject: Report on IRG #24 IRG meeting #24 was held from 24-27 May 2005 in Kyoto, Japan. I attended as Unicode liaison, Hiura Hideki from Sun attended as L2 representative, and Kobayashi Tatsuo was present as an individual participant. Member body participants were from China, Taiwan, HK SAR, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. Macao SAR, North Korea, and Singapore did not attend. Meeting #25 will be hosted by UC Berkeley from 28 November-2 December 2005. Meeting #26 will be six months later in Hue, Vietnam. Meetings #27 and 28 will be hosted by Taiwan and China, respectively. Hong Kong SAR reported that HK SCS 2004 is now official and published. Documentation is available at . Hong Kong has added 61 new characters to HK SCS, all of them already part of Unicode, and will include them in future releases of HK SCS. Vietnam is working on a new standard for n™m to replace the existing standards. I've made contact with the N™m Preservation Foundation and will be working with them to improve the Vietnamese readings and other data in the Unihan database. China announced that the Chinese version of 10646:2003 (aka GB 13000) is complete and will be published by the end of 2005 or early in 2006. Taiwan will published CNS 11643:2005 in July. They are also working on a standard, CNS 11643-3, to describe the structure of characters in planes 1 and 2 of CNS 11643. We announced the publication of Unicode 4.1 and the availability of the draft of UTS #37 for public review. We solicited comments from IRG members. I'll remind them by email after the meeting and ask for their comments. There was one demo at the meeting. Japanese researchers including Kawabata Taichi demonstrated an extensive on-line system using IDSs for expressing characters in terms of their constituent components. URLs are included in the document . IRG work at this meeting was as follows: The Editorial Working Group spent three days reviewing the current contents of Extension C1. There were mostly minor adjustments at this point. We ourselves had roughly a dozen characters in our submission unified with existing characters (on the basis of their being variants; it would be hypocritical for us to insist on their being encoded as separate characters at this point). Details will be available later. Extension C1 is now looking sufficiently stable that it will likely be finished at the next meeting. We need to begin the process of securing a font for publishing The Book. The IRG has committed to provide better tracking of reported errata and their resolution. Work on Extension C2 (or Extension D, depending on what it is finally called) will begin in earnest next year. Requirements for C2/D submissions will be hammered out in Berkeley. The IRG has committed to using IDSs in the work. IRG members have all agreed to provide source reference glyphs for Extension B, but it is not likely to be available until late 2006. We tried to push for a more aggressive schedule, but felt lucky to get what we did. The IRG will want to review the work once it's finished. Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of last-minute confusion as to the format desired for the reference glyphs. We may want to work with WG2 to get this clarified. A document submitted to the next IRG clarifying the purpose and requirements for the reference glyphs would be helpful. China and Taiwan have been actively working on Old Hanzi. The Old Hanzi Working Group has decided to begin with Oracle Bone forms. Submission standard have been developed (including the use of Shuowen, not Kangxi, radicals), and proposals are to be submitted before the next meeting. Kobayashi-san did an excellent job of convincing them not to encode every oracle bone form as a separate character. The Stroke Working Group reviewed all the forty-four candidates for strokes and did unifications on them. Their report, with their list of unifications, is at , and comments from members are solicited for the next IRG meeting. ======== John H. Jenkins