Unicode Explained

This strategy has not been as successful as you might think. There is a fairly small

number of named character sequences currently defined. The registry of definitions for

them is the text file http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamedSequences.txt.

The approach might still turn out to be useful, especially in giving advice to font de-

signers about sequences that might need a separately designed glyph.

Versions of Unicode

Unicode versions are numbers much the same way as program versions, using a hier-

archic number of the form m.n.p, where m is the major version number (which usually

remains the same for years), n is the minor version number, and p is the update ver-

sion number. For a detailed description, refer to http://www.unicode.org/versions/. The

format of citing Unicode and its versions is discussed in Chapter 5.

In practice, the minor version number 0 is often omitted—e.g., “Unicode 4.1” instead

of “Unicode 4.1.0.” In this book, “Unicode” means Unicode 4.1.0 unless otherwise

stated.

Unicode Version 1.0 used somewhat different names for some characters than ISO

10646. In Unicode Version 2.0, the names were made the same as in ISO 10646. How-

ever, the Version 1.0 names (such as “period” for “full stop”) are still preserved as

alternate names, mentioned both in code charts and in the Unicode database.

New versions of Unicode are expected to add new characters mostly, though changes ...