Unicode Demystified

Conforming to the Standard

What does it mean to say that you conform to the Unicode standard? The answer to this question varies depending on what your product does. The answer tends to be both more and less than what most people think.

First, conforming to the Unicode standard does not mean that you have to be able to properly support every single character that the Unicode standard defines. The Unicode standard simply requires that you declare which characters you do support. For the characters you claim to support, then you have to follow all the rules in the standard. In other words, if you declare your program to be Unicode conformant (and you're doing that if you use the word “Unicode” anywhere in your advertising or documentation) and ...