> Sorry - I thought it was clear from my description. Everyone is > using the word 'unicode' in the definition of 'unicode', or so it is > seeming to me. I've managed to get far enough to understand it's a > different way of expressing font usage, I guess, but I don't > understand when someone would want it or when they would not need it.
do you know utf8, do you know latin1, ISO-8859-15 or other things like these? Anyway: unicode ist an approach to assign one number to each "letter" or "sign" that is out there in the world. That's all. Well, in latin1/ISO-8859-1 you only have a basic rule: 1 byte per character You see? Only 1 byte, only 256 numbers and so only space for 256 characters - but there are >3000 chinesese symbols. So latin1 is a european charset and it contains most of the character/signs europeans need. But the trouble is: if an application internally works with latin1 only, how should it reprensent the chinese symbols? Think of your webbrowser: you can use it, to view european pages and also chinese pages. Yes, your browser uses unicode internally and that's very practical, because in unicode, he can represent every character/sign that's out there. Greetings, Sven
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
