Unicode Explained

Table of Contents

Preface .

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Part I. Working with Characters

1. Characters as Data .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Introduction to Characters and Unicode 3

What’s in a Character? 6

Variation of Writing Systems 28

Glyphs and Fonts 30

Definitions of Character Repertoires 37

Numbering Characters 40

Encoding Characters as Octet Sequences 44

Working with Encodings 50

Working with Fonts 59

Summaries 67

2. Writing Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Method Varieties 71

Keyboard Variation and Settings 75

Virtual Keyboards 79

Program Commands 83

Character Maps 91

Replacements on the Fly 96

Special Techniques 102

Escape Sequences 105

Specialized Editors 114

Exercise 115

3. Character Sets and Encodings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Good Old ASCII 120

ISO 8859 Codes 124

v

Windows Latin 1 and Other Windows Codes 127

Other 8-bit Codes 130

Unicode and UTF-8 138

Encodings for East Asian Language 143

Converters and Transcoding 146

Using Character Codes 148

Part II. ...