Unicode 5.1, Old Church Slavonic, Remaining Problems – and Solutions, including OpenType Features

In two previous articles (Kempgen 2006a, 2006b)1 we took a look at version 4.1 of the Unicode character encoding standard from the perspective of Slavic philology. These papers detailed important achievements (like the addition of Glagolica), noted some minor mistakes and reviewed the standard with respect to which characters would still have to be added to serve the needs of researchers in the area of Slavic philology, especially medievalists.2 Because these articles also contained a brief introduction to Unicode, its aims and purpose, and the different versions of this world-wide encoding standard, we need not repeat this information here.3 Both papers originated from presentations given at two conferences, especially the Azbuki.net conference in Sofia in 2005. At this conference, members of the Commission for “Computer Processing of Old Slavic Manuscripts ” of the International Congress of Slavists met to discuss various topics. One of the most important ones was the plan to further advance the support for Slavic philology in the Unicode standard by submitting a new proposal. Ralph Cleminson, who had already authored the proposal to add Glagolitic to Unicode, agreed to start work on a new proposal with all others contributing whatever material they had access t