Skip to Main Content
Fonts & Encodings
book

Fonts & Encodings

by Yannis Haralambous
September 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1040 pages
31h 23m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Fonts & Encodings

Chapter 3. Properties of Unicode characters

Our concern in this chapter is the information that Unicode provides for each character. According to our definition, a character is a description of a certain class of glyphs. One of these glyphs, which we have called the representative glyph, is shown in the Unicode charts, both in their hard-copy version [335] and in the PDF files available on the Web ([334]).

Unicode defines the identity of a character as the combination of its description and its representative glyph. On the other hand, the semantics of a character are given by its character identity and its normative properties.

This brings us to character properties. These are data on characters that have been collected over time and that can help us to make better use of Unicode. For example, one normative property of characters is their category. One possible category is "punctuation". A developer can thus know which characters of a given script are punctuation marks—information that will enable him to disregard those characters when sorting text, for example—without knowing anything at all about the script itself. Another property (not a normative one in this instance, and therefore more ambiguous) is the uppercase/lowercase correspondence. Unicode provides a table of these correspondences, which software can apply directly to convert a string from one case to the other (when the concept of case even applies to the writing system in question). Of course, none of these operations ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Unicode Demystified

Unicode Demystified

Richard Gillam
Unicode Explained

Unicode Explained

Jukka K. Korpela
Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

Oscar Baechler, Xury Greer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596102425Catalog PageErrata