ICU 3.0 d02 (beta) release available now

Dear friends and users of ICU,

We are pleased to announce that the d02 (beta) release of ICU Version 3.0 (http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/) is now 
available.

The ICU beta release 3.0 is available on our public web sites, http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/3.0/ and 
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/download/3.0/

Please use our bug reporting tool and support mailing lists, see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/

If you plan or consider to use ICU 3.0, then please download and test it at your earliest convenience.

Please submit bugs, porting changes and fixes(!) by Friday 06/04/2004.

Features of this reference release will include:
      * IO library (C) - POSIX like input/output library, icuio is officially supported.
      * Regular expressions C API (C)
      * ICU4J reads ICU4C's data files natively (J)
      * Java port of the new RBBI engine (J)
      * Unicode 4.0.1. support
      * Layout engine support for using different canonically equivalent Unicode forms of the same text.
      * Collation data is in a separate data tree, allowing for easier modularization.
      * Support for RFC 822 date format and currency amount formatting/parsing.
      * Transliterator based input method in ICU4J.
      * bug fixes, build times improvement, better platform support.

Please see the release notes on the download pages and the readme for a complete list of features and enhancements.

Regards,
v.

-- 
Vladimir Weinstein, IBM GCoC-Unicode/ICU  San Jose, CA [email protected]