The Mountain View, California-based Unicode Consortium has merged its multilingual encoding standard with the recently approved ISO 10646, developed by the International Standards Organisation. The idea is that computers all over the world should agree on which number stands for which character so they will be able to communicate other in any language and the group reckons the new standard will make multilingual software easier both to write and to manage, and that international information exchange should become more practical. The new ISO 10646 standard was approved by a majority of the voting ISO member countries, and Unicode will continue to co-operate with ISO on future enhancements of the standard, co-ordinating the efforts of coding experts on standardising modern and historical writing systems, as well as technical and publishing symbols. Additionally, the consortium supports implementors, addressing issues like internationalisation and large character sets. Unicode Inc is a consortium of computer companies dedicated to promoting a 16-bit standard for multilingual text and character encoding. These companies include Adobe Systems Inc, Apple Computer Corp, Borland International Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Ecological Linguistics, Go Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and its Metaphor Computer Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp, NeXT Computer Inc, Novell Inc, The Research Libraries Group, Sun Microsystems Inc, Taligent Inc, Unisys Corp and Xerox Corp. The Unicode 1.0 standard contains more than 30,000 characters and is claimed to encompasses most natural languages, as well as mathematical and scientific symbols. The new merged standard, ISO 10646, contains additional characters the consortium will document as soon as possible, and plans to produce an updated Version 1.1 by year-end.
