On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Anne Cartwright wrote: > I have been waiting to see if Marta would ask, but she probably > knows so I will ask. What is Unicode? In the increasingly > complicated world of computers, "one code" sounds like a good idea. > But I'm sure it's not simple.
Computers store the letters we type as numbers. Until recently, the numbers used were only 8 bits long, limiting the number of distinct characters to 255. Because of this limitation, there were many ways to do the mapping between the numbers and characters, depending on the needs of the language. The normal coding used in the United States is called ASCII. There are over a dozen other 8 bit encodings used just in Europe. If a document is written with one encoding in mind and then read on a machine with another encoding, many of the characters make no sense. Some years ago, a new standard was approved, called Unicode, using 16 bit numbers to represent letters. This means there are 65,535 distinct character positions available. This is enough space to uniquely encode all the characters of all the major languages with a lot of space left over. So, Unicode documents are portable worldwide between programs that know about Unicode. Any program written for Mac OS X ought to be Unicode aware. Older programs, running under Classic or Carbon, such as Appleworks, may not be Unicode aware. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 24 at Pitt Academy, 6010 Preston Highway. | The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
