Unicode Explained

There was a large reform of the use of diacritic marks in French in the 1990s. Generally,

their use was reduced. Old texts and even old programs (e.g., spellcheckers) might still

reflect the old rules. The new rules are described in the document “Rectification de

l’orthographe,” http://www.academiefrancaise.fr/langue/orthographe/plan.html.

Transliteration and Transcription

A conversion between essentially different writing systems, such as writing Greek

names in Latin letters, operates at a higher level than the character level. It presupposes

the existence of characters and some methods of rendering them. For example, you

could take some piece of Unicode-encoded Greek text and replace the Greek letters

with Latin letters according to some simple scheme. This would produce a file that is

Unicode-encoded, too, so that the scheme could be described as a mapping from the

set of Unicode characters into the same set. If the encoding is changed in this context,

it would be something logically quite distinct from the replacement operation. Thus,

the operation would be similar to modifying text with some editing commands, and

generally outside the scope of character set standards.

Conversions between writing systems produce, however, some specific problems in the

use of characters. The conversion schemes, especially those used in science, often use

diacritic marks and special characters. Writing ...