Since the publication of the author's paper "Unicode Standard for Urdu" in year 2000, Unicode version 3.2 has been released; Urdu language specialists have had consultation and discussions on status of different Urdu characters and glyphs; and experts have proposed several Urdu characters for inclusion into Unicode. The current paper is an update on these developments. In this paper, characters of Urdu have been categorized into 6 groups and the status of each group has been discussed vis-à-vis National Urdu Standard (UZT 1.01) and Unicode. A revised mapping table has been prepared after updating names of characters in conformity with Unicode 3.2. Errors identified in the mapping given in the paper "Unicode Standard for Urdu" have been rectified. Finally, some new characters and marks have been proposed for inclusion into the National Urdu Standard.

Keywords

Character codes, Code table, Coded character set, Encoding, Multilingual Processing, National Urdu Standard, Standardization, Unicode, Urdu, UZT

Conclusion

ISO/IEC 10646 /Unicode is fast assuming a standard for representing national character codes. It is imperative that the National Urdu Standard is fully compatible with Unicode for Urdu applications to be available seamlessly across different Unicode compatible platforms. The paper analyzes the status of different Urdu characters and recommends inclusion of certain characters into Unicode. It is hoped that with the inclusion of these and a few other characters, the Urdu script will be fully represented in Unicode.