Unicode 14

The release of Unicode 14 is delayed this year due to pressures due to 
Covid, however it is expected in September.

It contains the largest change to the Math Character blocks since the 
math alphabets were added at Unicode 3.1.

Unicode now recognises the two script styles Roundhand and Chancery 
(\mathscr and \mathcal in most LaTeX math font packages).

They share the same code points as the existing "ambiguous" script math 
alphabet block but (for upper case) you may use the variant selectors 
U+FE00 and U+FE01 to specify Chancery or Roundhand respectively.

See the beta version of the Unicode code charts at

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-14.0/U140-1D400.pdf


I have made an editor's draft of the HTML/XML Entities draft updated to 
Unicode 14, and referencing these new characters.

https://w3c.github.io/xml-entities/script.html


As Unicode 14 is in beta this is just in a u14 branch in the git 
repository but I have set github pages to display from that branch for now.


There are no changes to the normative entity definitions so & A s c r ;  
will still select the code point U+1D49C and not use the variant 
selector suffixes to force either style.


It may be a while before font support exists for these possibilities but 
many math fonts (eg Stix Two Math) already have both sets of glyphs, but 
currently the access is via font-specific font feature selection.


There have been some other additions to Unicode since the last release 
of the entities spec, notably U+FE00 may now also be used to distinguish 
0 from slashed zero and the two forms of the empty set (added at Unicode 
9 I think). Again the entities are not changing so (unfortunately) empty 
and varnothing both refer to U+2205 even though U+2205+FE00 is "EMPTY 
SET zero with long diagonal stroke"

This is a first draft update not reviewed by anybody, so comments 
welcome. At some point it may form the basis of an update to 
https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/ but no immediate plans for that, 
next year perhaps.

David

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