What is Unicode?
Recognizing that no single set of 256 characters can hold all of the symbols necessary for true multi-lingual texts, ISO 10646 was created. This defined the Universal Character Set (UCS) using 31 bits, which has the potential for a staggering 2 billion characters. The Unicode Consortium is a group of computer industry companies who define the Unicode standard. Unicode accepts the ISO 10646 standards, and adds some restrictions and implementation processes. It plans for a modest million or so characters; however, this is enough for all living and extinct languages, and imaginable future ones too. Using 4 bytes for each character is wasteful, though, when most characters need only one or two, and there are programming problems with implementing 4-byte characters, so Unicode provides Transformation Formats (UTF) which allow the characters to be encoded using fewer bytes where possible. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are common. UTF-8, which is the most practical of these from the PG point of view, allo
on the upper left, there is some text saying #1 below (in logical order, with uppercase standing for Arabic, lowercase for English). As I understand the bidi algorithm, this should be rendered as #2. This is what my application does, and an Arab speaker has confirmed to me that this is correct. My browser, however, displays this as #3. My understanding of both the bidi algorithm and of how to read bidi text says that this (by the bidi rules) is a predominantly RTL paragraph, and thus should be read ARABIC first, then English. Which is correct?
In the late 1980s, there have been two independent attempts to create a single unified character set. One was the ISO 10646 project of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the other was the Unicode Project organized by a consortium of (initially mostly US) manufacturers of multi-lingual software. Fortunately, the participants of both projects realized in around 1991 that two different unified character sets is not exactly what the world needs. They joined their efforts and worked together on creating a single code table. Both projects still exist and publish their respective standards independently, however the Unicode Consortium and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 have agreed to keep the code tables of the Unicode and ISO 10646 standards compatible and they closely coordinate any further extensions. Unicode 1.1 corresponded to ISO 10646-1:1993, Unicode 3.0 corresponded to ISO 10646-1:2000, Unicode 3.2 added ISO 10646-2:2001, and Unicode 4.0 corresponds to the forthcoming third v
In the late 1980s, there have been two independent attempts to create a single unified character set. One was the ISO 10646 project of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the other was the Unicode Project organized by a consortium of (initially mostly US) manufacturers of multi-lingual software. Fortunately, the participants of both projects realized in around 1991 that two different unified character sets is not exactly what the world needs. They joined their efforts and worked together on creating a single code table. Both projects still exist and publish their respective standards independently, however the Unicode Consortium and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 have agreed to keep the code tables of the Unicode and ISO 10646 standards compatible and they closely coordinate any further extensions. Unicode 1.1 corresponded to ISO 10646-1:1993, Unicode 3.0 corresponded to ISO 10646-1:2000, Unicode 3.2 added ISO 10646-2:2001, and Unicode 4.0 corresponds to ISO 10646:2003, and Uni
