The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments.
Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and modern operating systems.
Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 (which uses one byte for any ASCII characters, which have the same code values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters), the now-obsolete UCS-2 (which uses two bytes for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard), and UTF-16 (which extends UCS-2 to handle code points beyond the scope of UCS-2).
Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters — graphemes and grapheme-like units — rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).
In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point — a number, not a glyph — for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering (size, shape, font, or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicode's designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode.
The first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO 8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. Many essentially-identical characters were encoded multiple times at different code points to preserve distinctions used by legacy encodings and therefore, allow conversion from those encodings to Unicode (and back) without losing any information. For example, the "fullwidth forms" section of code points encompasses a full Latin alphabet that is separate from the main Latin alphabet section. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) fonts, these characters are rendered at the same width as CJK ideographs, rather than at half the width. For other examples, see Duplicate characters in Unicode.
The name "Unicode" is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding.
In this document, entitled Unicode 88, he outlined a 16 bit character model:
Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body ASCII" that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.
His original 16 bit design was based on the assumption that only those scripts and characters in modern use would need to be encoded:
Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 = 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally-useful Unicodes.
In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of RLG, and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems, and in 1990 Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag from Microsoft and Rick McGowan of NeXT joined the group. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready. The Unicode consortium was incorporated on January 3, 1991, in the state of California, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992.
In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts (e.g. Egyptian Hieroglyphs) and thousands of rarely-used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated as needing encoding.
Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing "U+" followed by its hexadecimal number. For code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), four digits are used (e.g. U+0058 for the character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER X); for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required (e.g. U+E0001 for the character LANGUAGE TAG and U+10FFFD for the character PRIVATE USE CHARACTER-10FFFD). Older versions of the standard used similar notations, but with slightly different rules. For example, Unicode 3.0 used "U-" followed by eight digits, and allowed "U+" to be used only with exactly four digits to indicate a code unit , not a code point.
Within each plane, characters are allocated in named blocks of related characters. Although blocks are an arbitrary size, they are always a multiple of 16 code points, and often, a multiple of 128 code points. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over several different blocks.
* Surrogate code points
Code points in the range U+D800..U+DBFF (1,024 code points) are known as high-surrogate code points, and code points in the range U+DC00..U+DFFF (1,024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point (also known as a leading surrogate) followed by a low-surrogate code point (also known as a trailing surrogate) together form a surrogate pair used in UTF-16 to represent 1,048,576 code points outside BMP. High and low surrogate code points are not valid by themselves. Thus the range of code points that are available for use as characters is U+0000..U+D7FF and U+E000..U+10FFFF (1,112,064 code points). The value of these code points (i.e. excluding surrogates) is sometimes referred to as the character's scalar value.
Noncharacters are code points that are guaranteed never to be used for encoding characters, although applications may make use of these code points internally if they wish. There are sixty-six noncharacters: U+FDD0..U+FDEF and any code point ending in the value FFFE or FFFF (i.e. U+FFFE, U+FFFF, U+1FFFE, U+1FFFF, ... U+10FFFE, U+10FFFF). The set of noncharacters is stable, and no new noncharacters will ever be defined.
Reserved code points are those code points which are available for use as encoded characters, but are not yet defined as characters by Unicode.
Private-use code points are considered to be assigned characters, but they have no interpretation specified by the Unicode standard so any interchange of such characters requires an agreement between sender and receiver on their interpretation. There are three private-use areas in the Unicode codespace:
* Private Use Area: U+E000..U+F8FF (6,400 characters)
Graphic characters are characters defined by Unicode to have a particular semantic, and either have a visible glyph shape or represent a visible space. As of Unicode 6.0 there are 109,242 graphic characters.
Format characters are characters that do not have a visible appearance, but may have an effect on the appearance or behavior of neighboring characters. For example, U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER and U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER may be used to change the default shaping behavior of adjacent characters (e.g. to inhibit ligatures or request ligature formation). There are 142 format characters in Unicode 6.0.
Sixty-five code points (U+0000..U+001F and U+007F.. U+009F) are reserved as control codes, and correspond to the C0 and C1 control codes defined in ISO/IEC 6429. Of these U+0009 (Tab), U+000A (Line Feed), and U+000D (Carriage Return) are widely used in Unicode-encoded texts.
Graphic characters, format characters, control code characters, and private use characters are known collectively as assigned characters.
All graphic, format, and private use characters have a unique and immutable name by which they may be identified. Although a Unicode character name may not be changed under any circumstances (historically this was not the case), in cases where the name is seriously defective and misleading, or has a serious typographical error, a formal alias may be defined, and applications are encouraged to use the formal alias in place of the official character name. For example, U+A015 YI SYLLABLE WU has the formal alias YI SYLLABLE ITERATION MARK, and U+FE18 PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR has the formal alias PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRACKET.
The Consortium first published The Unicode Standard (ISBN 0-321-18578-1) in 1991, and continues to develop standards based on that original work. The latest major version of the standard, Unicode 6.0 was published on-line in 2010, and is available from the consortium's web site. The last version to be published in book form was Unicode 5.0 (ISBN 0-321-48091-0), but since Unicode 6.0 the standard has no longer been published in book form.
Unicode is developed in conjunction with the International Organization for Standardization and shares the character repertoire with ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set. Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 function equivalently as character encodings, but The Unicode Standard contains much more information for implementers, covering — in depth — topics such as bitwise encoding, collation and rendering. The Unicode Standard enumerates a multitude of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text. The two standards do use slightly different terminology.
Thus far the following major and minor versions of the Unicode standard have been published (update versions, which do not include any changes to character repertoire, are omitted).
{| class="wikitable" |- !rowspan=2| Version !rowspan=2| Date !rowspan=2| Book !rowspan=2| Corresponding ISO/IEC 10646 Edition !rowspan=2| Scripts !colspan=2| Characters |- ! # ! Notable additions |- | 1.0.0 | October 1991 | ISBN 0-201-56788-1 (Vol.1) | | 24 | 7,161 | Initial repertoire covers these scripts: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bopomofo, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek and Coptic, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan. |- | 1.0.1 | June 1992 | ISBN 0-201-60845-6 (Vol.2) | | 25 | 28,359 | The initial set of 20,902 CJK Unified Ideographs is defined. |- | 1.1 | June 1993 | | ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 | 24 | 34,233 | 4,306 more Hangul syllables added to original set of 2,350 characters. Tibetan removed. |- | 2.0 | July 1996 | ISBN 0-201-48345-9 | ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5, 6 and 7 | 25 | 38,950 | Original set of Hangul syllables removed, and a new set of 11,172 Hangul syllables added at a new location. Tibetan added back in a new location and with a different character repertoire. Surrogate character mechanism defined, and Plane 15 and Plane 16 Private Use Areas allocated. |- | 2.1 | May 1998 | | ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5, 6 and 7, and two characters from Amendment 18 | 25 | 38,952 | Euro sign added. |- | 3.0 | September 1999 | ISBN 0-201-61633-5 | ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 | 38 | 49,259 | Cherokee, Ethiopic, Khmer, Mongolian, Myanmar, Ogham, Runic, Sinhala, Syriac, Thaana, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, and Yi Syllables added, as well as a set of Braille patterns. |- | 3.1 | March 2001 | | ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 | 41 | 94,205 | Deseret, Gothic and Old Italic added, as well as sets of symbols for Western music and Byzantine music, and 42,711 additional CJK Unified Ideographs. |- | 3.2 | March 2002 | | ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 plus Amendment 1 ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 | 45 | 95,221 | Philippine scripts Buhid, Hanunó'o, Tagalog, and Tagbanwa added. |- | 4.0 | April 2003 | ISBN 0-321-18578-1 | ISO/IEC 10646:2003 | 52 | 96,447 | Cypriot syllabary, Limbu, Linear B, Osmanya, Shavian, Tai Le, and Ugaritic added, as well as Hexagram symbols. |- | 4.1 | March 2005 | | ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendment 1 | 59 | 97,720 | Buginese, Glagolitic, Kharoshthi, New Tai Lue, Old Persian, Syloti Nagri, and Tifinagh added, and Coptic was disunified from Greek. Ancient Greek numbers and musical symbols were also added. |- | 5.0 | July 2006 | ISBN 0-321-48091-0 | ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1 and 2, and four characters from Amendment 3 | 64 | 99,089 | Balinese, Cuneiform, N'Ko, Phags-pa, and Phoenician added. |- | 5.1 | April 2008 | | ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1, 2, 3 and 4 | 75 | 100,713 | Carian, Cham, Kayah Li, Lepcha, Lycian, Lydian, Ol Chiki, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sundanese, and Vai added, as well as sets of symbols for the Phaistos Disc, Mahjong tiles, and Domino tiles. There were also important additions for Myanmar, additions of letters and Scribal abbreviations used in medieval manuscripts, and the addition of capital ß. |- | 5.2 | October 2009 | | ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 | 90 | 107,361 | Avestan, Bamum, Egyptian hieroglyphs (the Gardiner Set, comprising 1,071 characters), Imperial Aramaic, Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian, Javanese, Kaithi, Lisu, Meetei Mayek, Old South Arabian, Old Turkic, Samaritan, Tai Tham and Tai Viet added. 4,149 additional CJK Unified Ideographs (CJK-C), as well as extended Jamo for Old Hangul, and characters for Vedic Sanskrit. |- | 6.0 | October 2010 | | ISO/IEC 10646:2010 plus the Indian rupee sign | 93 | 109,449 | Batak, Brahmi, Mandaic, playing card symbols, transport and map symbols, alchemical symbols, emoticons and emoji. |}
Although 93 scripts in Unicode are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets, abugidas and syllabaries), there are many more scripts yet to be encoded, particularly those which are mainly used in historical, liturgical, and academic contexts. Further additions of characters to the already-encoded scripts, as well as symbols, in particular for mathematics and music (in the form of notes and rhythmic symbols), also occur. The Unicode Roadmap Committee (Michael Everson, Rick McGowan, and Ken Whistler) maintain the list of scripts that are candidates or potential candidates for encoding and their tentative code block assignments on the Unicode Roadmap page of the Unicode Consortium Web site. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen, Nü Shu, Tangut, and Linear A, encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For others scripts, such as Mayan and Rongorongo, no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character repertoire and other details from the user communities involved.
Some modern invented scripts which have not yet been included in Unicode (e.g., Tengwar) or which do not qualify for inclusion in Unicode due to lack of real-world use (e.g., Klingon) are listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry, along with unofficial but widely-used Private Use Area code assignments.
The Script Encoding Initiative, a project run by Dr. Deborah Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley was founded in 2002 with the goal of funding proposals for scripts not yet encoded in the standard. The project has become a major source of proposed additions to the standard in recent years.
Several mechanisms have been specified for implementing Unicode; which one implementers choose depends on available storage space, source code compatibility, and interoperability with other systems.
UTF encodings include:
UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per code point and, being compact for Latin scripts and ASCII-compatible, provides the de facto standard encoding for interchange of Unicode text. It is also used by most recent Linux distributions as a direct replacement for legacy encodings in general text handling.
The UCS-2 and UTF-16 encodings specify the Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) for use at the beginnings of text files, which may be used for byte ordering detection (or byte endianness detection). Some software developers have adopted it for other encodings, including UTF-8, so software can distinguish UTF-8 from local 8-bit code pages. In this case it attempts to mark the file as containing Unicode text. The BOM, code point U+FEFF has the important property of unambiguity on byte reorder, regardless of the Unicode encoding used; U+FFFE (the result of byte-swapping U+FEFF) does not equate to a legal character, and U+FEFF in other places, other than the beginning of text, conveys the zero-width no-break space (a character with no appearance and no effect other than preventing the formation of ligatures). Also, the units FE and FF never appear in UTF-8. The same character converted to UTF-8 becomes the byte sequence EF BB BF.
In UTF-32 and UCS-4, one 32-bit code value serves as a fairly direct representation of any character's code point (although the endianness, which varies across different platforms, affects how the code value manifests as an octet sequence). In the other cases, each code point may be represented by a variable number of code values. UTF-32 is widely used as internal representation of text in programs (as opposed to stored or transmitted text), since every Unix operating system which uses the gcc compilers to generate software uses it as the standard "wide character" encoding. Recent versions of the Python programming language (beginning with 2.2) may also be configured to use UTF-32 as the representation for Unicode strings, effectively disseminating such encoding in high-level coded software.
Punycode, another encoding form, enables the encoding of Unicode strings into the limited character set supported by the ASCII-based Domain Name System. The encoding is used as part of IDNA, which is a system enabling the use of Internationalized Domain Names in all scripts that are supported by Unicode. Earlier and now historical proposals include .
GB18030 is another encoding form for Unicode, from the Standardization Administration of China. It is the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC). BOCU-1 and SCSU are Unicode compression schemes. The April Fools' Day RFC of 2005 specified two parody UTF encodings, UTF-9 and UTF-18.
An example of this arises with hangul, the Korean alphabet. Unicode provides the mechanism for composing hangul syllables with their individual subcomponents, known as hangul Jamo. However, it also provides all 11,172 combinations of precomposed hangul syllables.
The CJK ideographs currently have codes only for their precomposed form. Still, most of those ideographs comprise simpler elements (often called radicals in English), so in principle, Unicode could have decomposed them just as has happened with hangul. This would have greatly reduced the number of required code points, while allowing the display of virtually every conceivable ideograph (which might do away with some of the problems caused by the Han unification). A similar idea covers some input methods, such as Cangjie and Wubi. However, attempts to do this for character encoding have stumbled over the fact that ideographs do not decompose as simply or as regularly as it seems they should.
A set of radicals was provided in Unicode 3.0 (CJK radicals between U+2E80 and U+2EFF, KangXi radicals in U+2F00 to U+2FDF, and ideographic description characters from U+2FF0 to U+2FFB), but the Unicode standard (ch. 12.2 of Unicode 5.2) warns against using ideographic description sequences as an alternate representation for previously encoded characters:
{| class="wikitable" style="font-family: monospace;" |colspan="3" align="center"| WGL-4, MES-1 and MES-2 |-style="font-family:serif;"| ! Row !! Cells !! Range(s) |- !rowspan="2"| 00 | 20–7E | Basic Latin (00–7F) |- | A0–FF | Latin-1 Supplement (80–FF) |- !rowspan="2"| 01 | 00–13, 14–15, 16–2B, 2C–2D, 2E–4D, 4E–4F, 50–7E, 7F | Latin Extended-A (00–7F) |- | 8F, 92, B7, DE-EF, FA–FF | Latin Extended-B (80–FF ...) |- !rowspan="3"| 02 | 18–1B, 1E–1F | Latin Extended-B (... 00–4F) |- | 59, 7C, 92 | IPA Extensions (50–AF) |- | BB–BD, C6, C7, C9, D6, D8–DB, DC, DD, DF, EE | Spacing Modifier Letters (B0–FF) |- ! 03 | 74–75, 7A, 7E, 84–8A, 8C, 8E–A1, A3–CE, D7, DA–E1 | Greek (70–FF) |- ! 04 | 00, 01–0C, 0D, 0E–4F, 50, 51–5C, 5D, 5E–5F, 90–91, 92–C4, C7–C8, CB–CC, D0–EB, EE–F5, F8–F9 | Cyrillic (00–FF) |- ! 1E | 02–03, 0A–0B, 1E–1F, 40–41, 56–57, 60–61, 6A–6B, 80–85, 9B, F2–F3 | Latin Extended Additional (00–FF) |- ! 1F | 00–15, 18–1D, 20–45, 48–4D, 50–57, 59, 5B, 5D, 5F–7D, 80–B4, B6–C4, C6–D3, D6–DB, DD–EF, F2–F4, F6–FE | Greek Extended (00–FF) |- !rowspan="3"| 20 | 13–14, 15, 17, 18–19, 1A–1B, 1C–1D, 1E, 20–22, 26, 30, 32–33, 39–3A, 3C, 3E | General Punctuation (00–6F) |- | 44, 4A, 7F, 82 | Superscripts and Subscripts (70–9F) |- | A3–A4, A7, AC, AF | Currency Symbols (A0–CF) |- !rowspan="3"| 21 | 05, 13, 16, 22, 26, 2E | Letterlike Symbols (00–4F) |- | 5B–5E | Number Forms (50–8F) |- | 90–93, 94–95, A8 | Arrows (90–FF) |- ! 22 | 00, 02, 03, 06, 08-09, 0F, 11–12, 15, 19–1A, 1E–1F, 27-28, 29, 2A, 2B, 48, 59, 60–61, 64–65, 82–83, 95, 97 | Mathematical Operators (00–FF) |- ! 23 | 02, 0A, 20–21, 29–2A | Miscellaneous Technical (00–FF) |- !rowspan="3"| 25 | 00, 02, 0C, 10, 14, 18, 1C, 24, 2C, 34, 3C, 50–6C | Box Drawing (00–7F) |- | 80, 84, 88, 8C, 90–93 | Block Elements (80–9F) |- | A0–A1, AA–AC, B2, BA, BC, C4, CA–CB, CF, D8–D9, E6 | Geometric Shapes (A0–FF) |- ! 26 | 3A–3C, 40, 42, 60, 63, 65–66, 6A, 6B | Miscellaneous Symbols (00–FF) |- ! F0 | (01–02) | Private Use Area (00–FF ...) |- ! FB | 01–02 | Alphabetic Presentation Forms (00–4F) |- ! FF | FD | Specials |}
Rendering software which cannot process a Unicode character appropriately often displays it as an open rectangle, or the Unicode “replacement character” (U+FFFD, ), to indicate the position of the unrecognized character. Some systems have made attempts to provide more information about such characters. The Apple LastResort font will display a substitute glyph indicating the Unicode range of the character, and the SIL Unicode fallback font will display a box showing the hexadecimal scalar value of the character.
UTF-8 (originally developed for Plan 9) has become the main storage encoding on most Unix-like operating systems (though others are also used by some libraries) because it is a relatively easy replacement for traditional extended ASCII character sets.
Multilingual text-rendering engines which use Unicode include Uniscribe for Microsoft Windows, ATSUI and Core Text for Mac OS X, and Pango for GTK+ and the GNOME desktop.
ISO 14755 , which standardises methods for entering Unicode characters from their codepoints, specifies several methods. There is the Basic method, where a beginning sequence is followed by the hexadecimal representation of the codepoint and the ending sequence. There is also a screen-selection entry method specified, where the characters are listed in a table in a screen, such as with a character map program.
MIME defines two different mechanisms for encoding non-ASCII characters in e-mail, depending on whether the characters are in e-mail headers such as the "Subject:" or in the text body of the message. In both cases, the original character set is identified as well as a transfer encoding. For e-mail transmission of Unicode the UTF-8 character set and the Base64 or the Quoted-printable transfer encoding are recommended, depending on whether much of the message consists of ASCII-characters. The details of the two different mechanisms are specified in the MIME standards and generally are hidden from users of e-mail software.
The adoption of Unicode in e-mail has been very slow. Some East-Asian text is still encoded in encodings such as ISO-2022, and some devices, such as cell telephones, still cannot handle Unicode data correctly. Support has been improving however. Many major free mail providers such as Yahoo, Google (Gmail), and Microsoft (Hotmail) support it.
All W3C recommendations have used Unicode as their document character set since HTML 4.0. Web browsers have supported Unicode, especially UTF-8, for many years. Display problems result primarily from font related issues; in particular, versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer do not render many code points unless explicitly told to use a font that contains them.
Although syntax rules may affect the order in which characters are allowed to appear, both HTML 4 and XML (including XHTML) documents, by definition, comprise characters from most of the Unicode code points, with the exception of:
These characters manifest either directly as bytes according to document's encoding, if the encoding supports them, or users may write them as numeric character references based on the character's Unicode code point. For example, the references Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말 (or the same numeric values expressed in hexadecimal, with &#x as the prefix) should display on all browsers as Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.
When specifying URIs, for example as URLs in HTTP requests, non-ASCII characters must be percent-encoded.
Free and retail fonts based on Unicode are widely available, since TrueType and OpenType support Unicode. These font formats map Unicode code points to glyphs.
Thousands of fonts exist on the market, but fewer than a dozen fonts — sometimes described as "pan-Unicode" fonts — attempt to support the majority of Unicode's character repertoire. Instead, Unicode-based fonts typically focus on supporting only basic ASCII and particular scripts or sets of characters or symbols. Several reasons justify this approach: applications and documents rarely need to render characters from more than one or two writing systems; fonts tend to demand resources in computing environments; and operating systems and applications show increasing intelligence in regard to obtaining glyph information from separate font files as needed, i.e. font substitution. Furthermore, designing a consistent set of rendering instructions for tens of thousands of glyphs constitutes a monumental task; such a venture passes the point of diminishing returns for most typefaces.
In terms of the new line, Unicode did introduce U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR. This was an attempt to provide a Unicode solution to encoding paragraphs and lines semantically, potentially replacing all of the various platform solutions. In doing so, Unicode does provide a way around the historical platform dependent solutions. Nonetheless, few if any Unicode solutions have adopted these Unicode line and paragraph separators as the sole canonical line ending characters. However, a common approach to solving this issue is through new line normalization. This is achieved with the Cocoa text system in Mac OS X and also with W3C XML and HTML recommendations. In this approach every possible new line character is converted internally to a common new line (which one does not really matter since it's an internal operation just for rendering). In other words, the text system can correctly treat the character as a new line, regardless of the input's actual encoding.
Unicode has been criticized for failing to allow for older and alternative forms of kanji which, critics argue, complicates the processing of ancient Japanese and uncommon Japanese names, although it follows the recommendations of Japanese language scholars and of the Japanese government, and includes all characters contained in previous, widely-used encoding standards. There have been several attempts to create alternative encodings that preserve the minor, stylistic differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in opposition to Unicode's policy of Han unification. Among them are TRON (although it is not widely adopted in Japan, there are some users who need to handle historical Japanese text and favor it), and UTF-2000.
Although the repertoire of fewer than 21,000 Han characters in the earliest version of Unicode was largely limited to characters in common modern usage, Unicode now includes more than 70,000 Han characters, and work is continuing to add thousands more historic and dialectal characters used in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Some Japanese computer programmers objected to Unicode because it requires them to separate the use of '\' U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (backslash) and '¥' U+00A5 YEN SIGN, which was mapped to 0x5C in JIS X 0201, and a lot of legacy code exists with this usage. (This encoding also replaces tilde '~' 0x7E with overline '¯', now 0xAF.) The separation of these characters exists in ISO 8859-1, from long before Unicode.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![[WIN7] Change non-unicode settings to see Japanese characters that saved in SHIFT-JIS format.](http://web.archive.org./web/20101209213843im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KNDs7oduhTE/2.jpg "[WIN7] Change non-unicode settings to see Japanese characters that saved in SHIFT-JIS format.")
![A square metre quadrat made of PVC pipe. The square metre is the SI derived unit of area, with symbol m2 (33A1 in Unicode[1]). It is defined as the area of a square whose sides measure exactly one metre.](http://web.archive.org./web/20101209213843im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/fb/cf/2be734d197f2fd8a1f9501355c03_grande.jpg "A square metre quadrat made of PVC pipe. The square metre is the SI derived unit of area, with symbol m2 (33A1 in Unicode[1]). It is defined as the area of a square whose sides measure exactly one metre.")
![A square metre quadrat made of PVC pipe. The square metre is the SI derived unit of area, with symbol m2 (33A1 in Unicode[1]). It is defined as the area of a square whose sides measure exactly one metre.](http://web.archive.org./web/20101209213843im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/fb/cf/2be734d197f2fd8a1f9501355c03_thumb.jpg "A square metre quadrat made of PVC pipe. The square metre is the SI derived unit of area, with symbol m2 (33A1 in Unicode[1]). It is defined as the area of a square whose sides measure exactly one metre.")
