FYI: After a very long process the European Commission has rejected the standardization project for “Core Character repertoire” (that was also presented at IUC 34) with the following rationale:
“As the Unicode standard includes all the standard characters needed in all official EU languages as well as almost all characters needed in most of the world’s writing systems, it is difficult to see what benefits there would be in implementing a specialisation of Unicode only for EU languages. “In addition, the problems described in the proposal are related to non-implementation of this standard, and a new one would not change these problems. It would appear from the above that the Commission is regrettably unaware of the difference between encoding and character repertoire issues and the extensive work needed to be done with confusables and other security aspects of Unicode as well as of the need for guidance on the fallback mechanisms required in several instances. Unfortunately, since the said “specialisation” is ultimately required for the implementation of public registers in each country for both their own use and also for the much needed interoperability between EU member states, they’ll have to do it on their own without the benefits of a joint standardization effort. Sincerely, Erkki I. Kolehmainen
