Encoding on the Internet

7: Unicode

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What is Unicode?

Although multiple encoding standards have been developed and implemented for multiple scripts, ideally it would be nice if there were one super encoding scheme which covered all the scripts in the world in a standard fashion.

Unicode (www.unicode.org) is a global encoding scheme which seeks to include all characters in all scripts in one super global encoding system. Unicode 4 includes most current national scripts and many CJK characters, but the most recent standards may not be incorporated into all software packages.

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Template

Unicode is structured as follows

• Characters #0-255 - Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1)
  • Characters #0-127 - ASCII
  • Characters #128-255 - Rest of Latin 1
• Blocks - The rest of the characters are organized in blocks by script. See the Unicode Charts (www.unicode.org/charts/) for details.

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Advantages

Unicode allows:

• One web page to display multiple scripts. Before only the Roman alphabet and one other script was possible.
• Text files from any computer in any language to be exchanged without special encoding-translaton algorithms.
• Font support to be standardized and universal
• Each character in each script to have one encoding code point

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Test Pages and Progress

The most recent operating systems support Unicode, although not all software does. Font and software support for Unicode is still being developed, but you can see some Unicode test pages are at:

• TITUS Unicode Test Page (scroll down to see list of tested scripts)
  titus.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/unitest.htm
• "Why Can't They Just Speak..."
  www.trigeminal.com/samples/provincial.html
• Macchiato Unicode Transcriptions
  www.macchiato.com/unicode/Unicode_transcriptions-old.html

See the Unicode Setup page for more information on viewing Unicode pages.

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Links

Unicode Resources

• Alan Wood's Unicode Resources - Includes practical information and updates on using and developing in Unicode
• Gallery of Unicode Fonts - Organized by language
• Unicode Organization - Includes charts, updates, listserv and more.
• Links to PDF Unicode Charts - Organized by scripts.
• Tex Texin, International Guy - A semi blog like page, but good information.
• Unicode Block Viewer - View Unicode codes by script block. Proper fonts must be installed.
• Unicode Standards (Evertype) - Unicode resources listed on the right under "Standards".
• Unicode Glyph Finder - Searches by hexadecimal character code
• Unicode Glyph Names - In text format. Long, but informative.

Unicode Operating Systems

• Unicode and Mac OS X - Basic Information on Unicode implementation on Mac OS X
• Unicode How To for Linux - Very detailed
• Unicode FAQ for Unix - Information on Unicode in the Linux and Unix environment.
• Czyborra.com - a good tutorial on Unicode and some information on using it in Unix.

Advanced Unicode

• Joel on Software: What Every Programmer Should Know about Unicode - Tutorial on how different implementations of Unicode differ.
• Michael Everson's Submissions to the Unicode Technical Committee - A number of official proposals submitted by Everson, a key player in the Unicode consortium.

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©Penn State University, 2000-2007.
This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).

Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.

Last Modified: Tuesday, 06-Mar-2007 12:17:26 EST