There has been a flurry of IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) activity this year.
First, UTS #37 (Unicode Ideographic Variation Database) was updated at the end of January to allow characters with the “Ideographic” property to serve as valid base characters in an IVS (Ideographic Variation Sequence). This effectively means that the Tangut (西夏文) and Nüshu (女书/女書) scripts can now participate in the IVD.
Second, two PRIs (Public Review Issues), #349 and #351, were issued earlier this year and have since closed. These will result in four additional registered IVSes for the Adobe-Japan1 IVD collection, and the registration of the new KRName IVD collection.
Third, PRI #354 was issued today (2017-08-15), which proposes 674 additional IVSes for the registered Moji_Joho IVD collection, 181 of which are to be shared with registered Hanyo-Denshi IVSes. An excerpt is shown at the beginning of this article. A new version of the IVD will be published shortly after this PRI closes, and will include the results of all three PRIs.
Fourth, the draft version of IRG P&P (Principles & Procedures) Version 10, which will be discussed and hopefully approved at WG2 #66 next month, includes much stronger language about the IVD, such as encouraging member bodies to handle unifiable characters by registering new IVSes in a new or existing IVD collection. For those who are interested in the details, two drafts are available on the IRG #48 landing page as IRG N2222.
Fifth, though not directly related to the IVD, I noticed that Unicode Version 9.0 added an SVS (Standardized Variation Sequence) for a slashed version of U+0030 0 DIGIT ZERO, <U+0030,U+FE00>, and given that the Adobe-Japan1-6 glyph set includes multiple “slashed zero” glyphs, including one that is based on U+FF10 ０ FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO, I decided to propose a new SVS for the latter via L2/17-294, which will be discussed at UTC #153 in October. Once accepted, both SVSes will be added to the Adobe-Japan1-6 UVS (Unicode Variation Sequence) definition file.
Although it is keeping me busy, I am very pleased to see increased IVD-related interest and activity.
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