Unicode

What is it? Unicode is arguably one of the most important unmentioned technologies offered by most modern operating systems. Basically its a standard, defined character set like ASCII or ISO-8859-1. Unlike these other character sets, however, Unicode is capable of representing the characters of a multitude of languages. In short, it's a single character set that is designed to represent the characters used in almost all modern-day "live" languages (and some dead ones, too)!

In today's increasingly multilingual landscape of the Internet, the possibilities offered by Unicode for multi-lingual communications are exciting (well, let's keep it in perspective; it won't replace beer, sex, or eating).

The problem is that there are many questions to be asked and solved while this standard is gradually making its way into our operating systems; there's often discrepencies between implementations. Enough so that there exist numerous websites serving as information repositories for Unicode in each of its platform flavors.

In any case, you use Unicode, you'll need Unicode fonts. Mac OS X and Windows come with some pre-installed.

Unicode Consortium. To find out more about Unicode in general, point your browser to the Unicode Consortium site. They're the organization responsible for defining the standard. They are not, however, in the business of implementing it, so don't complain about Unicode "bugs" in your system; they can't help you.

Unix & Linux. If you use Linux or Unix, chances are that you're at least casually familiar with Unicode. If you're curious to learn more, there's a general faq at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html which answers some questions about getting started with and trouble shooting Unicode software services.

There's also a more formal coverage of the topic created by Roman Czyborra, which can be found on his home page at http://www.czyborra.com/.

Mac OS and Mac OS X. Although Syggrafeus currently runs only on Mac OS X, both operating systems support Unicode (although only Mac OS X does it well). Unicode comes pre-installed on Mac OS 9.x and above and Mac OS X, so there aren't any Internet installation/configuration resources out there for it. Just like a Mac; it just works.

Windows 98/Me & Windows NT/2000/XP. These versions of Windows all have Unicode support built-in as well (although I believe Windows 98's implementation isn't quite as rich, but I could certainly be wrong).