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Unicode

Gradually, all software by Stefan Trost Media was expanded to full Unicode support to ensure international compatibility of all programs. But what is Unicode and what is there to consider when dealing with Unicode? On these pages you will get all important information about Unicode and Unicode texts, the opportunities to save Unicode in different formats and important thinks of Unicode and fonts. How to enter Unicode characters, you can read in the section Input. In addition, the Unicode Glossary provides the opportunity to learn more about the concepts and formats.

What is Unicode?

Contrary to many assumptions, Unicode is not a particular font, nor any programming language. Instead, Unicode is an international standard, in which each character is dedicated a special code. In the long run, all characters and text elements of all known sign systems will have a correlation in Unicode, so that there are many advantages of Unicode over other encodings.

While the storage of text in the conventional ASCII format only allows 128 different characters (256 in the ANSI format), it is theoretically possible to save all possible characters of all writing systems of the world in just one file using Unicode. Moreover, in the ASCII and ANSI format, many of the 128 or 256 characters are already predefined control characters, so that there are less characters for use. Especially in the international exchange of files, or the compatibility of software that is to be run on as many computers around the world as possible, Unicode has a particular importance.

The Unicode Standard was and is developed by the Unicode Consortium founded in 1991. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that is funded exclusively through membership fees. Meanwhile, almost all major software companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and IBM are members of the Unicode Consortium. The consortium works closely together with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO publishes the ISO 10646 standard, which fully complies with the Unicode encoding.

Meanwhile Unicode already contains more than 100,000 characters, so that the entire code space can no longer be embedded as glyphs within a single font file. In the most common file formats, TrueType and OpenType a maximum of only 65,536 glyphs can be saved. In any case, most fonts contain only very few characters compared to the possibilities of the Unicode character set. The topic Unicode Fonts on this page deals with this problem.

The storage of Unicode can be done in various formats, which have different advantages and disadvantages, so that you have to decide according to the use and purpose what format is fitting the best. The topic Unicode Formats on this compilation deals with this issue and the various Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF). Nevertheless, it is important to note that each code point corresponds to only one specific character and a character that is set once will be changed never again to ensure compatibility. More information about this topic, you can get here. The different Unicode formats refer only to the different representation of the same code points.

At last, on the topic software, there is a list of all software projects by Stefan Trost Media, which can handle Unicode. Here you can find a list of the software and the functions related to Unicode. You can also find direct links to the download and description pages of the software on this page.