June 2006
Beginner
688 pages
26h 18m
English
Content preview from Unicode Explained
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What’s in a Character?
We use characters
daily: we type them, and we read them on screen or on paper. We
use text-processing programs routinely, much like people used to use typewriters, pens,
or other writing tools. How could characters create problems?
Why Do We Need to Know About Characters?
If English is your native language, you are accustomed to using a small set of characters,
consisting of the letters A–Z and a–z, digits 0–9, and a few punctuation characters.
Most novels, newspaper articles, and memos contain no other characters. Since you
seem to be able to type these characters directly on a keyboard, why should you learn
more about characters and get confused? To be honest, character issues are confusing.
Suppose you use a computer only to write and edit texts in English, perhaps as a sec-
retary or a technical editor. You still have reasons to know about characters:
Figure 1-1. Character Map, part of Windows XP, lets you type any Unicode character
6 | Chapter 1: Characters as Data
• Computer technology has caused a decline in typography, and you can make a
positive impression by using correct punctuation instead of typewriter-style punc-
tuation. If you use a text-processing program, it probably takes care of using
“smart” quotation marks instead of "straight" quotes, but you
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.