"Rich has a clear, colloquial style that allows him to make even complex Unicode matters understandable. People dealing with Unicode will find this book a valuable resource." --Dr. Mark Davis, President, The Unicode Consortium As the software marketplace becomes more global in scope, programmers are recognizing the importance of the Unicode standard for engineering robust software that works across multiple regions, countries, languages, alphabets, and scripts. Unicode Demystified offers an in-depth introduction to the encoding standard and provides the tools and techniques necessary to create today's globally interoperable software systems. An ideal complement to specifics found in The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 (Addison-Wesley, 2000), this practical guidebook brings the "big picture" of Unicode into practical focus for the day-to-day programmer and the internationalization specialist alike. Beginning with a structural overview of the standard and a discussion of its heritage and motivations, the book then shifts focus to the various writing systems represented by Unicode--along with the challenges associated with each. From there, the book looks at Unicode in action and presents strategies for implementing various aspects of the standard. Topics covered include: The basics of Unicode--what it is and what it isn't The history and development of character encoding The architecture and salient features of Unicode, including character properties, normalization forms, and storage and serialization formats The character repertoire: scripts of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and more, plus numbers, punctuation, symbols, and special characters Implementation techniques: conversions, searching and sorting, rendering, and editing Using Unicode with the Internet, programming languages, and operating systems With this book as a guide, programmers now have the tools necessary to understand, create, and deploy dynamic software systems across today's increasingly global marketplace. 0201700522B08092002