Unicode Demystified

Chapter 16. Rendering and Editing

If the second most important process performed on text is string comparison (the basis of sorting and searching), by far the most important process for text is rendering—that is, drawing it on a computer screen or printing it on a piece of paper. Much of the time it goes hand in hand with providing the user a means of entering text into the computer or editing the text once it's been entered.

Rendering and editing text are both enormously complicated subjects, and we will not go into all the gory details here. Most of the time you'll be able to take advantage of the facilities provided by your operating environment to allow you to render and edit Unicode text. Much of the complexity also isn't unique to Unicode, ...