FAQ - Specifications (original) (raw)

Q: How can I find out whether a particular issue is covered by a specification published by the Consortium. And where do I look it up?

The Unicode Standard and related standards contain a number of specifications or guidelines for dealing with different programming tasks. Sometimes it's hard to find these as they are not all provided as specific, dedicated documents.

The following table lists subject areas for which the Unicode Consortium provides specifications, with a location and brief description what each specification covers. Citations of chapters or section numbers refer to the core specification of the Unicode Standard.

Q: Which Unicode specifications are normative?

Some Unicode specifications are normative and others are informative. For sections from the core specification of the Unicode Standard, the material in Chapter 3, Conformance, and most of Chapter 4, Character Properties, are normative, while material in other sections is generally informative. The Unicode Standard Annexes (UAX) are formally a part of the Unicode Standard, and most of the material in them is normative, unless otherwise indicated in the annex itself. For Unicode Technical Standards (UTS), the specifications are normative parts of those independent standards. Unicode Technical Reports (UTR) contain informative material. For more information about UAXs, UTSes, and UTRs, see About Unicode Technical Reports.

Q: Where can I find the rationale behind a given specification?

Specifications published by the Unicode Consortium are created and amended by decision from the owning technical committee. These decisions are captured in the TC's minutes and they are usually based on detailed proposal documents. For some specification there has been an effort by the Consortium or outside websites to organize this data in a way that it can be related back to specific text sections or encoded characters.

The following table list sources of information on specific technical decisions or the rationale behind them.

Unicode Technical Committee
Minutes and supporting documents	Register
Minutes and supporting documents	Search
Character Encoding
ScriptSource, information on scripts	Scripts Overview
Unicode Status for each script (Example: Arabic)	Arabic
Wikipedia, information on Unicode blocks	Category: Unicode Blocks
History section for each Unicode block (Example: Arabic)	Arabic_(Unicode_block)
Emoji Proposals	By proposal
Emoji Proposals	By code point
Algorithms
Linebreaking Algorithm	Annotated

Q: Where can I find out when a character was encoded or a feature was added to a given specification?

For both the Core Spec of the Unicode Standard and its Annexes, as well as Technical Standards and Reports, a "Modifications" section highlights changes from the preceding version. Tracking these backwards gives information on when a particular change was introduced, but the granularity is not particularly fine, nor is there a cross-reference with particular decisions and supporting documents. For encoded characters, the Unicode Character Database file DerivedAge.txt indicates the version a character was added to the standard. For some specifications an annotated version provides a more fine-grained documentation of the version and rationale for each change.