Unicode
Character encoding standard
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We include updates on International Phonetic Alphabet, Optical character recognition, Box-drawing characters, Non-breaking space, Astrological symbols, List of XML and HTML character entity references, Byte order mark, Zero-width space, Regional indicator symbol, Zalgo text, Ghost characters, Combining character, Universal Character Set characters, Soft hyphen, CJK Unified Ideographs, Universal Coded Character Set ... and more.
| 2025 |
DIN 91379
OpenPDF project noted as currently not active, with OpenPDFSaucer maintaining a fork of the original project.
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| 2024 |
Universal Coded Character Set
UTF-32 encoding permits a binary representation of all existing code points in APIs and software applications as of this year.
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| November 1 2024 |
DIN 91379
Compliance with DIN 91379 becomes mandatory for German authorities and organizations when exchanging data with citizens and businesses.
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| September 2024 |
Box-drawing characters
Unicode version 16.0 was released, extending the Unicode standard with a new block called Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement, which includes additional box-drawing characters and symbols from obsolete operating systems primarily from the 1970s and 1980s.
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| September 2024 |
Universal Character Set characters
Unicode version released, with 299,056 (27%) code points allocated, 155,063 (14%) characters assigned, and 137,468 (12%) reserved for private use.
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| 2023 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
China's Ministry of Public Security added 622 characters to the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block in the Unicode Supplementary Ideographic Plane, spanning the range U+2EBF0 through U+2EE5F.
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| 2022 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 15.0 added 1 character to CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C and introduced Extension H in the Tertiary Ideographic Plane (TIP) with 4,192 characters, bringing the total to 97,058 characters.
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| August 2022 |
DIN 91379
The final DIN standard for DIN 91379 was formally established, completing the initial standardization process.
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| July 2022 |
DIN 91379
German federal IT architecture guideline demands the usage of the predecessor standard DIN SPEC 91379.
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| June 2022 |
DIN 91379
Revision of DIN 2137-1 keyboard layouts E1 and E2 was completed to enable entry of all characters in DIN 91379 (except Cyrillic letters) without using Unicode values or decimal codes.
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| May 2022 |
DIN 91379
DIN 5009:2022-06 standard was published, providing German-language names, spelling rules, and announcement words for characters in DIN 91379.
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| January 2022 |
Hearts in Unicode
Middle Eastern news publications reported that sending a Red Heart emoji on WhatsApp in Saudi Arabia could be considered harassment, potentially leading to a maximum two-year jail sentence.
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| 2021 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 14.0 added 3 CJK Unified Ideographs to the BMP, 2 to Extension B, and 4 to Extension C.
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| December 14 2021 |
Bidirectional text
Visual Studio version 17.0.3 was released, implementing highlighting of Unicode bidirectional control characters to mitigate the Trojan Source vulnerability.
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| October 2021 |
Bidirectional text
Visual Studio Code version 1.62 was released, introducing highlighting of Unicode bidirectional (BiDi) control characters to address potential security vulnerabilities.
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| 2020 |
IDN homograph attack
Microsoft Edge adopts the Chromium-based browser approach to handling IDN homograph attacks.
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| 2020 |
Universal Coded Character Set
ISO/IEC 10646:2020 was published, providing the base for Unicode 13.0 and subsequent versions, demonstrating the continuous evolution of the Universal Coded Character Set.
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| 2020 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 13.0 significantly expanded CJK character sets by adding 13 CJK Unified Ideographs to the BMP, 10 to CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A, 7 to Extension B, and introduced Extension G in the Tertiary Ideographic Plane (TIP) with 4,939 characters.
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| March 2020 |
Plane
Unicode 13.0 was released, adding CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G to the Tertiary Ideographic Plane (TIP)
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| January 20 2020 |
XeTeX
The last known change to the XeTeX source code was made, with no further development occurring after this date.
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| 2019 |
IDN homograph attack
Chiba et al. developed DomainScouter, a system capable of detecting diverse IDN homographs by analyzing approximately 4.4 million registered IDNs across 570 Top-Level Domains, successfully identifying 8,284 previously undetected IDN homographs targeting brands in multiple languages.
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| 2019 |
IDN homograph attack
Suzuki et al. introduced ShamFinder, a research program designed to recognize Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) homographs, providing insights into their real-world prevalence.
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| 2019 |
Hearts in Unicode
The Unicode Consortium ranked the Heart Eyes emoji (😍) as the third most used emoji, behind the Red Heart and Face with Tears of Joy emoji.
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| March 2019 |
DIN 91379
DIN SPEC 91379 was specified, marking a significant milestone in the standardization process for character encoding and representation.
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| 2018 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 11.0 added 5 CJK Unified Ideographs to the BMP, bringing the total to 87,887 characters.
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| December 2018 |
DIN 91379
Previous version of DIN 2137-1 keyboard layout standard was released, which was later revised to include support for characters in DIN 91379.
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| 2017 |
IDN homograph attack
Chrome tightens IDN restrictions in version 59 to prevent spoofing attacks, specifically addressing issues with Cyrillic character domain names.
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| 2017 |
Universal Coded Character Set
ISO/IEC 10646:2017 was released, corresponding to Unicode 10.0, continuing the ongoing expansion of character sets.
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| 2017 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 10.0 added CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F in the SIP with 7,473 characters and 21 additional characters, increasing the total to 87,882 characters.
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| 2016 |
IDN homograph attack
Google Chrome version 51 implements an algorithm to handle IDN display, similar to Firefox's approach of managing potential homograph attacks.
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| 2015 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 8.0 introduced CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E in the SIP with 5,762 characters and 9 additional characters, expanding the total to 80,388 characters.
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| 2014 |
Universal Coded Character Set
ISO/IEC 10646:2014 was published, setting the groundwork for future Unicode versions with new character inclusions.
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| 2012 |
IDN homograph attack
Mozilla Firefox version 22 introduces a new approach to displaying IDNs, showing them only if the TLD prevents homograph attacks or labels do not mix scripts for different languages.
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| 2012 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 6.1 added 1 character corresponding to Adobe-Japan1-6 CID+20156, increasing the total to 74,617 characters.
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| 2011 |
Universal Coded Character Set
ISO/IEC 10646:2011 was released, corresponding to Unicode 6.0, with various character additions and amendments.
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| 2010 |
CJK Unified Ideographs
Unicode 6.0 added CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D in the SIP with 222 characters, bringing the total to 74,616 characters.
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This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Universal Character Set characters, Box-drawing characters, DIN 91379, Plane (Unicode), Universal Coded Character Set, Han unification, CJK Unified Ideographs, IDN homograph attack, XeTeX, Bidirectional text & Hearts in Unicode, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.