Unicode Explained

Preface

Characters often seem simple on the surface, but they are at the heart of a wide variety

of

data communications and data processing problems, including text processing,

typesetting, styling text, text databases, and the transmission of textual information.

Computers were invented just for computing. For quite some time, they were so ex-

pensive that their use was limited to the most important numerical calculations that

would have been impossible otherwise. Text was used mainly to add legends and

headings to numeric output, often using a very limited character repertoire, maybe even

lacking lowercase letters. As the cost of computing has dropped, computers have be-

come extensively used for human communication in text format. Most people think of

computers as communicators rather than calculators. People want to communicate in

different languages, and we also use notation systems that may require rich repertoires

of characters.

Unicode was developed to help make this both possible and smooth. Unicode was first

defined in the early 1990s, but its use has progressed fairly slowly. Modern computers

often use Unicode internally, but applications and users still tend to work with older

character codes, which are often very limited. It has been rather complicated to work

with Unicode in text processing, for example. At long last, however, these problems

are becoming easier to ...