Unicode is an encoding that allows all characters from all languages to be identified uniquely:
http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html Remember that to a computer, these letters you're seeing are represented internally as just numbers. In the bad old days, what would happen is that different encodings might use the same number to represent different characters. So you might have the number 27 representing one character in the English alphabet while representing some other number in, say, the Cyrillic alphabet. Unicode does away with all that--every character in every language has a distinct and unique encoding. The number 27 represents one and only one character in the Unicode world. The one (minor) drawback is of course that you need a lot of bits to represent all those characters--Unicode requires up to 32 bits for each character. --- Rex. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu] On Behalf Of Anne Cartwright Sent: Monday, December 05, 2005 12:41 PM To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu Subject: Re: MacGroup: Diacritic marks 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. Anne Lee Larson wrote: > On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:18 AM, Anne Cartwright reported: > >> It doesn't seem to work in AppleWorks, and the macrons came through >> the mail after the vowels, but at least I know what it's called. > > > I kind of expected it to fail in Appleworks. One of the reasons Apple > is letting the program die is the lack of Unicode support. I am > surprised Thunderbird is not 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> | 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>
