Unicode Explained

this irrelevant. However, studying such issues and practicing with them will help a lot

in creating a background for more technical work with the infrastructures of character

usage.

In explaining practical ways of doing things, this book often uses Microsoft Windows

and Microsoft Office programs as examples. This is because so many people use such

software and need to know how to use Unicode in them. Moreover, even if you per-

sonally prefer other software, odds are good that you need to work with Windows and

Office at times. Information on using Unicode in some other environments can be

found in the following:

• Markus Kuhn: “UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux,” which is available at

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

• Tom Gewecke: “Unleash Your Multilingual Mac,” which is available at http://

hometown.aol.com/tg3907/mlingos9.html

After the first three chapters, this book gets more technical, and many of the issues

discussed are abstract and even formal. Therefore, understanding most of the material

in the initial chapters is essential for the rest. To most people, it is very difficult to read

about abstract things if you lack a concrete background that lets you map the abstract

concepts and rules to specific practice.

This book explores Unicode processing generally, but cannot go into great detail on all

parts of the Unicode character space. For much more information ...