Unicode Explained

Sometimes the benefits of text format turn into drawbacks, or they are regarded as

problems. If you send a contract by email and ask the recipient to print, sign, and send

it, can you be sure that he does not edit the text before printing, without your noticing?

Ease of copying text can be a problem, if it is used to violate your copyright. For such

reasons, plain text and even other text forms are sometimes avoided. Perhaps even a

printing possibility is undesirable. Some data formats, such as PDF, can be locked, or

protected against copying and modification and printing—though in a relative sense

only.

Giving Identity to Characters

To represent characters in digital form, we need to encode them using bits, but first we

need something to encode. We need a collection of characters that are distinguishable

from each other. We do not define characters individually but as parts of a collection.

The Latin letter “A” is defined, among other things, by designating it as distinct from

lowercase “a” or from any Greek or Cyrillic letter.

A character is also described by its meaning, or semantics. However, we must be careful

about this. A character is usually just an atom of text and normally lacks a meaning in

the sense that words or some parts of words have meanings. In the word “singing,” the

stem “sing” and the suffix “‑ing” have meanings, but it would not be natural to say that

the letter “g” has a ...