The latest Unicode Standard, Version 5.2, was released at the beginning of October, 2009. A lot is added each standard, but I confess that the most noteworthy for me was that an Egyptian Heiroglyphic block (U+13000 to U+1342E) was added. It was certainly the largest block added at 1071 code points.
Additional code points added included blocks for Avestan, Old South Arabic, Samaratian, Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Parthian, Old Turkic. In addition, supporting characters were added for the Coptic, Devanagari (esp Vedic support), Hangul (Old Korean), Phonecian and other ancient script blocks.
In South and Southeast Asia, support was added for Javanese, Tai Tham, Lisu, Kaithi, Meitei Mayak, Myanmar (new points), New Tai Lue (new points) and others. In other regions, a new Caniadian Aboriginal Syllabics Extended block was created with 80 additional code points. Some African scripts were also encoded including the Banum script and Rumi numerals. Additions were also made to various math and symbol blocks.
For a complete list of changes, see the information on the DerivedAge.txt file (scroll to end) and Revised Unicode 5.2 charts. In terms of support, there may be freeware (or commercial) fonts available, but time will be needed to develop the input utilities and then for these glyphs to be incorporated into major operating systems.
Until then…there’s always Unicode 6.0.
