Mountain View, CA, April 23, 2012 - The Unicode® Consortium is pleased to announce the publication of the final text of the core specification for Unicode 6.1. The Unicode 6.1 core specification documents newly encoded scripts, certain conformance clarifications, and other updates and improvements to the text. In Version 6.1, the standard grew by 732 characters.

Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard continues the Unicode Consortium'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.

This version of the Standard brings technical improvements to support implementers, particularly with improvements to property values and their aliases that enable easier programmatic use. Other improvements include line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text and segmentation behavior of Thai, Lao, and other similar languages.

In January 2012, the other portions of Unicode 6.1 were released: the Unicode Standard Annexes, code charts, and the Unicode Character Database, to allow vendors to update their implementations of Unicode 6.1 as quickly as possible. The release of the core specification completes the definitive documentation of the Unicode Standard, Version 6.1.

For more information on all of The Unicode Standard, Version 6.1, see https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/ .