Lee Larson wrote: > 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.
I thought it was my typing skills or lack thereof. > > 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. Thanks for the information. Now I wonder how long it will take before the computer world needs more space! > > 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. Anne | 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>
