Unicode

1
Unicode

• Mark Davis
• Unicode Consortium President
• IBM Chief SW Globalization Architect
• 2003-09-24

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Universal Character Encoding

• Unique number for every character

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Unifies all Languages

• 96 thousand characters, so far
• All characters accessible at the same time, in
  the same document
• A, Ž, ?, ?, ?,
• ?, ?, ?,
• ?, ?, ?, ..

4
Lingua Franca for Computers

• Developed supported by industry leaders
• Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle,
  SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys,
• Required by modern standards
• XML, HTML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP,
  CORBA 3.0, WML, Perl, etc.
• Implemented in
• All modern operating systems, browsers, and other
  products

5
International Domain Names

• Approved - Unicode-Based
• Examples
• http//??????.com
• http//?a??a????.com
• http//????.com

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Standard Resources

• www.unicode.org
• Online Standard
• Technical Reports
• FAQs
• General Information
• Discussion Forums, Conferences

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Programming Resources

• System APIs
• Windows, Java, Unix, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Mac,
  Linux,
• Languages
• Java, JavaScript, C, Perl 5.6.0, C, C, SQL,
• Cross-platform libraries
• ICU, Rosette,

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Stability

• Developers / other standards need absolute
  stability
• Characters are never moved or deleted
• Ordering of characters is by collation, not
  binary order. See UTS 10 Unicode Collation
  Algorithm
• Characters may be deprecated (discouraged).
• Characters never change names
• Annotations are used to clarify usage
• See Unicode Policies

9
Indic Support in Unicode

• ISCII the basis for characters and allocation
• Consortium actively engaged with Indian
  Government, which is a member
• Welcomes addition of missing characters (e.g.
  Vedic), clarifications or corrections of usage

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Structural Similarities with ISCII

• Within script, layout and contents nearly
  identical
• Independent dependent vowels
• Halant model for representing conjuncts
• conjuncts / half-forms not directly encoded
• represented by sequences instead
• Phonetic sequence order in syllables

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Structural Differences with ISCII

• Unicode is stateless
• No shifting to get different scripts
• Each character has a unique number
• Unicode is uniform
• No extension bytes necessary
• All characters coded in the same space

12
Additional Characters

• Indian Government is developing proposals for
• Additions of missing characters
• Vedic
• Individual characters for certain scripts
• Annotations and Descriptions

13
Global Applications now support languages of India

• Companies supporting Indic with Unicode
• OpenType fonts
• Font support for Indic
• Microsoft Windows
• Java (IBM contributed ICU Indic Layout)
• Linux

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Benefits for India

• All documents, anywhere in the world, can have
  Indic text
• Allows seamless multilingual documents in India
• including scriptures and minority languages
• Opens up software export market, beyond English
• Connects India to the world

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How India Can Contribute

• Effective Communication with the Unicode
  Consortium
• Provide Resources for Development
• Descriptions of Usage
• Descriptions of Character Shaping
• Transliteration Tables from Script to Script
• Collation Information
• OpenType fonts

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What Developers Can Do

• Interwork with existing ISCII systems
• Move to Unicode for future developments
• Java, Windows, Linux,

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The Future

• The world is moving rapidly to Unicode
• Unicode makes India open to the world
• The world comes to you, and
• You go to the world
• You can help

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Q A
19
Backup Slides
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Multiple Forms

• UTF-8 maximal compatibility with 8-bit systems
• UTF-16 good storage, interoperability with
  Windows/Java
• UTF-32 simplest processing
• Fast, lossless conversion
• See Forms of Unicode