
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 ...