Unicode Explained

CHAPTER 1

Characters as Data

Computers

were originally built to process numbers. Over the last few decades, they've

become increasingly better at handling text as well, but the transition from human

scribbling and beautiful typography to bits and bytes has been complicated. Going from

a paper document to a computerized representation of that document means learning

about how the computer handles text, and requires learning about characters, character

codes, fonts, and encodings. Unicode provides a set of solutions for some of these

problems, while retaining presentation flexibility for making text look as we feel it

should.

Introduction to Characters and Unicode

Computer programs use two basic data types in most of their processing: characters

and numbers. These basic types are combined in various ways to create strings, arrays,

records, and other data structures. (Inside the computer, characters are numbers, but

the ways that these numbers are handled is very different from numbers meant for

calculation.)

Early computers were largely oriented toward numerical computation. However, char-

acters were used early on in administrative data processing, where names, addresses,

and other data needed to be stored and printed as strings. Text processing on computers

became more common much later, when computers had become so affordable that

they replaced typewriters. At present, most text documents are