Unicode Explained

Unicode Charts by Mark Davis

This site (http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/charts.html) lists only Unicode 3.0

characters, but it has some useful features. It lets you search for the code of a

character by typing or pasting a character into a text box and hitting Enter. You

can also view the GIF images of characters instead of the rendering of your browser

using some font on your computer.

Unicode Character Properties Excel Workbook

This site (http://scripts.sil.org/ExcelUnicodeData) presents the contents of several

Unicode database files as a single file that you can open in MS Excel or in Excel

Viewer.

DecodeUnicode, a wiki activity

This site (http://www.decodeunicode.org) combines data extracted from the Uni-

code site with additional data contributed to different people using the wiki ap-

proach: anyone can write and edit anything. Therefore, the site contains a mixture

of descriptive information. The user interface is not intuitive, and much of the

material is in German only.

Unicode and Fonts

One of the 10 design principles is that Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. Thus,

Unicode is not about fonts. Although proper presentation of some Unicode text re-

quires a font that contains the characters actually used in the text, any such font will

do. You can even use a mixture of fonts. The font selections have to be made outside

Unicode.

Unicode as Plain Text

Unicode is basically for plain text, ...