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Saturday, May 16, 2020

UNUM 3.2: Updated to Unicode 13

Version 3.2 of UNUM is now available for downloading. Version 3.2 incorporates the Unicode 13.0.0 standard, released on March 10th, 2020. The update to Unicode adds support for four scripts for languages, additional CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) symbols, 55 new emoji, and symbols from legacy computer and teletext systems and Creative Commons licenses. There are a total of 143,859 characters in 13.0.0, of which 5930 are new since 12.1.0. (UNUM also supports an additional 65 ASCII control characters, which are not assigned graphic code points in the Unicode database.)

This is an incremental update to Unicode. There are no structural changes in how characters are defined in the databases, and other than the presence of the new characters, the operation of UNUM is unchanged.

UNUM also contains a database of HTML named character references (the sequences like “<” you use in HTML source code when you need to represent a character which has a syntactic meaning in HTML or which can't be directly included in a file with the character encoding you're using to write it). There have been no changes to this standard since UNUM 2.2 was released in September 2017, so UNUM 3.2 will behave identically when querying these references except, of course, that numerical references to the new Unicode characters will be interpreted correctly.

UNUM Documentation and Download Page

Posted at 13:26 Permalink

Saturday, May 9, 2020

ISBNiser and ISBNquest Version 2.1 Released

I have just posted version 2.1 of the ISBNiser utility and ISBNquest Web resource. These are utilities which validate, inter-convert, and properly format all varieties of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) specifications. Both utilities have been updated to use the most recent version of the ISBN Range database (Wed, 6 May 2020 14:51:46 CEST), replacing the October 2018 version previously used. The range database is used to parse ISBNs into their components (Prefix, Registration group, Registrant, Publication, and Checksum) and used by these tools to re-format ISBNs with the correct punctuation.

ISBNquest has been updated to use the new Amazon Product Advertising API 5.0 to look up books on Amazon and find title, author, and other information for a book from its ISBN. This replaces the 4.0 version of the API which has been retired and no longer works. The mechanism used to locate Kindle editions of print books has been completely redesigned and should now work for many more (but, due to limitations in the API, not all) books.

There are no user interface changes in either of these utilities, and updating to them should be completely transparent for all human and programmatic queries.

Posted at 20:57 Permalink