S
Susan Bugher
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/t...nted=2&ei=1&en=3c9d6b7eba36dd68&ex=1065534614
Includes a great explanation of what Unicode is - excerpts below.
<quote>
For the last 10 years, Mr. Everson, who has American and Irish
citizenship, has played a crucial role in developing Unicode, which
might be viewed as the computer age's Rosetta stone. Mr. Everson
explains Unicode as "a big, giant font that is supposed to contain all
the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages in the world."
A more technical explanation of Unicode is this: When Mr. Everson sends
e-mail in ogham, his computer isn't sending ogham letters through the
ether. Instead, strings of 0's and 1's are transmitted, and when they
arrive on a friend's computer, they generate on its screen the same
ogham letters that Mr. Everson typed. Unicode is the master list that
resides in both computers and translates individual letters and symbols
into strings of 0's and 1's and back again. Most current software is
Unicode-compliant, which means that this master list of all the world's
writing systems has been built into operating systems, browsers and
software.
The code assigned to all 96,000 characters is handled only by
programmers in its naked form, while computer users (and sometimes
vendors) install the specific fonts that represent a specific alphabet.
A font renders a language readable to humans; Unicode renders a font
readable to computers.
SNIP
The solution was Unicode, an international standard for character
encoding. (Character encoding is simply any system that transmits
textual information; Morse code is one example.) Last month the latest
version of the standard, Unicode Standard Version 4.0, was published. It
contains encodings (that is, unique strings of 0's and 1's) for some
96,000 letters and symbols. Approximately 70,000 of them are Chinese
characters. Unicode also contains support for 54 other writing systems,
from Mongolian to Thai to Gothic to Cyrillic.
SNIP
As vast as Version 4.0 seems, it is still not complete, and nearly 100
writing systems remain to be encoded.
</quotes>
Susan
Includes a great explanation of what Unicode is - excerpts below.
<quote>
For the last 10 years, Mr. Everson, who has American and Irish
citizenship, has played a crucial role in developing Unicode, which
might be viewed as the computer age's Rosetta stone. Mr. Everson
explains Unicode as "a big, giant font that is supposed to contain all
the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages in the world."
A more technical explanation of Unicode is this: When Mr. Everson sends
e-mail in ogham, his computer isn't sending ogham letters through the
ether. Instead, strings of 0's and 1's are transmitted, and when they
arrive on a friend's computer, they generate on its screen the same
ogham letters that Mr. Everson typed. Unicode is the master list that
resides in both computers and translates individual letters and symbols
into strings of 0's and 1's and back again. Most current software is
Unicode-compliant, which means that this master list of all the world's
writing systems has been built into operating systems, browsers and
software.
The code assigned to all 96,000 characters is handled only by
programmers in its naked form, while computer users (and sometimes
vendors) install the specific fonts that represent a specific alphabet.
A font renders a language readable to humans; Unicode renders a font
readable to computers.
SNIP
The solution was Unicode, an international standard for character
encoding. (Character encoding is simply any system that transmits
textual information; Morse code is one example.) Last month the latest
version of the standard, Unicode Standard Version 4.0, was published. It
contains encodings (that is, unique strings of 0's and 1's) for some
96,000 letters and symbols. Approximately 70,000 of them are Chinese
characters. Unicode also contains support for 54 other writing systems,
from Mongolian to Thai to Gothic to Cyrillic.
SNIP
As vast as Version 4.0 seems, it is still not complete, and nearly 100
writing systems remain to be encoded.
</quotes>
Susan