There are hundreds of different encoding systems for mapping characters to numbers, but Unicode promises a single mapping. Contains everything you need to understand Unicode, this comprehensive reference from O'Reilly takes you on a detailed guide through the complex character world. The first few chapters provide you with a tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. It gives you a strong understanding of the terminology you need to reference various components, including character sets, fonts and encodings, glyphs and character repertoires. The middle part gives more detailed information on using Unicode code and the other characters. It explains the principles and methods of defining character codes, describes some of the code is widely used, and presents code conversion techniques. It also discusses the nature of the character, preparing and sorting, line breaking rules and Unicode encoding.