Unicode Explained

Summaries

The

following summaries use very concise language, and they are hardly understand-

able in isolation. However, having read the text of this chapter, you may find them

useful and return to them later. The terminology related to characters varies quite a lot,

so the summaries help in checking out how this book names things.

Summary of Definitions

Following is a list of terms you may come across:

Character

A basic unit of textual information, as abstract concept, as opposed to stylistic and

typographic variation between shapes that can be identified as the same character.

Character code

A mapping, often presented in tabular form, that defines a one-to-one correspond-

ence between characters in a character repertoire and a set of nonnegative integers.

Character encoding

A method (algorithm) for presenting characters in digital form by mapping se-

quences of code numbers of characters into sequences of octets. Encodings have

names, which can be registered.

Figure 1-25. In the Firefox browser, the default fonts can be specified as different for different scripts;

here they are set for the Thai script

Summaries | 67

Code number

The integer assigned

to a character in a character code. Synonyms: code position,

code value, code element, code point, code set value, code.

Character repertoire

A collection ...