Unicode Demystified

What Unicode Isn't

It's also important to keep in mind what Unicode isn't. First, Unicode is a standard scheme for representing plain text in computers and data communication. It is not a scheme for representing rich text (sometimes called “fancy text” or “styled text”). This distinction is important. Plain text is the words, sentences, numbers, and so forth themselves. Rich text is plain text plus information about the text, especially information on the text's visual presentation (for example, the fact that a given word is in italics), the structure of a document (for example, the fact that a piece of text is a section header or footnote), or the language (for example, the fact that a particular sentence is in Spanish). Rich text may also include ...