About UniCode


The eight-bit ASCII code cannot handle all the characters and symbols used by all languages world-wide. Some languages have thousands of distinct characters. If the PC is to be useful throughout the world, it requires some means of accommodating a wider range of characters. The UniCode Worldwide Character Standard was designed to bridge this language gap. By using a 16-bit code for individual characters, UniCode has the potential to encode 65,536 distinct symbols. The downside is, of course, any program must reserve twice the space to stored individual characters.

UniCode has been incorporated into the latest operating system designs and their file systems. Directory entries in new file systems, for example, make allowances for 16-bit character entries.

UniCode makes a distinction between characters and glyphs. Under the UniCode definition, a glyph is the visual representation of a character. The character is the underlying concept, the understood meaning of the symbol. A glyph is what prints; the character is what you understand the glyph to mean. According to the UniCode design, a character has no inherent image of its own. A font, under this definition, therefore, is a collection of glyphs rather than characters.

UniCode is also language neutral. Although it encodes the symbols used by many different languages, merely examining a list of the characters used does not in itself reveal what language is being encoded. UniCode requires a higher level protocol to define the language being encoded.

In its current version, 2.0, UniCode includes characters not only for most major language writing systems in use in the world today[md]a total of 25 different scripts[md]but it also includes symbols for classical and historic languages. A total of 38,885 characters are currently defined for use with languages in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and Oceana.

Even at this, the current version is not definitive. The symbol needs for some language systems are still being defined and eventually will be accommodated into future versions.

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This article was sent to us by: Isaac Teropa at 06242010

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