Unicode Explained

easy to find incorrect or seriously confusing information about Unicode and characters,

even in new books. People find themselves in a maze of twisty little passages of char-

acters, fonts, encodings, and related concepts.

This book guides you through the Unicode and character world. It explains how to

identify and classify characters—whether common, uncommon, or exotic—and to

type them, to use their properties, and to process character data in a robust manner. It

helps you to live in a world with several character encodings.

Audience

Readers of this book are expected to be familiar with computers and how computers

work, broadly speaking. They are not expected to know computer programming,

though many readers will use the contents in system design and programming.

This book is intended for people with different backgrounds and needs, including:

• An end user of multilingual or specialized text-related applications. For example,

anyone who works with texts containing mathematical or special symbols, or uses

a multilingual database. These readers should probably explore Chapters 1

through 3 first, practice with that content, and then read Chapters 7 and 8.

• An IT professional who needs to understand Unicode and work with it. The need

might arise from text data conversion tasks, from creating internationalized soft-

ware or web sites, or from system design or programming in ...