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http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html
Contents
The basics Definitions: character repertoire, character code, character encoding Examples of character codes Good old ASCII Another example: ISO Latin 1 alias ISO 8859-1 More examples: the Windows character set(s) The ISO 8859 family Other "extensions to ASCII" Other "8-bit codes" ISO 10646 (UCS) and Unicode More about the character concept The Unicode view Control characters (control codes) A glyph - a visual appearance What's in a name? Glyph variation Fonts Identity of characters: a matter of definition Failures to display a character Linear text vs. mathematical notations Compatibility characters Compositions and decompositions Typing characters Just pressing a key? Program-specific methods for typing characters "Escape" notations ("meta notations") for characters How to mention (identify) a character Information about encoding The need for information about encoding The MIME solution An auxiliary encoding: Quoted-Printable (QP) How MIME should work in practice Problems with implementations - examples Practical conclusions Further reading
The basics
In computers and in data transmission between them, i.e. in digital data processing and transfer, data is internally presented as octets, as a rule. An octet is a small unit of data with a numerical value between 0 and 255, inclusively. The numerical values are presented in the normal (decimal) notation here, but notice that other presentations are used too, especially octal (base 8) or hexadecimal (base 16) notation. Octets are often called bytes, but in principle, octet is a more definite concept than byte. Internally, octets consist of eight bits (hence the name, from Latin octo 'eight'), but we need not go into bit level here. However, you might need to know what the phrase "first bit set" or "sign bit set" means, since it is often used. In terms of numerical values of octets, it means that the value is greater than 127. In various contexts, such octets are sometimes interpreted as negative numbers, and this may cause various problems. Different conventions can be established as regards to how an octet or a sequence of octets presents some data. For instance, four consecutive octets often form a unit that presents a real number according to a specific standard. We are here interested in the presentation of character data (or string data; a string is a sequence of characters) only. In the simplest case, which is still widely used, one octet corresponds to one character according to some mapping table (encoding). Naturally, this allows at most 256 different characters being represented. There are several different encodings, such as the well-known ASCII encoding and the ISO Latin family of encodings. The correct interpretation and processing of character data of course requires knowledge about the encoding used. For HTML documents, such information should be sent by the Web server along with the document itself, using so-called HTTP headers (cf. to MIME headers). Previously the ASCII encoding was usually assumed by default (and it is still very common). Nowadays ISO Latin 1, which can be regarded as an extension of ASCII, is often the default. The current trend is to avoid giving such a special position to ISO Latin 1 among the variety of encodings.
Definitions
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The following definitions are not universally accepted and used. In fact, one of the greatest causes of confusion around character set issues is that terminology varies and is sometimes misleading. character repertoire A set of distinct characters. No specific internal presentation in computers or data transfer is assumed. The repertoire per se does not even define an ordering for the characters; ordering for sorting and other purposes is to be specified separately. A character repertoire is usually defined by specifying names of characters and a sample (or reference) presentation of characters in visible form. Notice that a character repertoire may contain characters which look the same in some presentations but are regarded as logically distinct, such as Latin uppercase A, Cyrillic uppercase A, and Greek uppercase alpha. For more about this, see a discussion of the character concept later in this document. character code A mapping, often presented in tabular form, which defines a one-to-one correspondence between characters in a character repertoire and a set of nonnegative integers. That is, it assigns a unique numerical code, a code position, to each character in the repertoire. In addition to being often presented as one or more tables, the code as a whole can be regarded as a single table and the code positions as indexes. As synonyms for "code position", the following terms are also in use: code number, code value, code element, code point, code set value - and just code. Note: The set of nonnegative integers corresponding to characters need not consist of consecutive numbers; in fact, most character codes have "holes", such as code positions reserved for control functions or for eventual future use to be defined later. character encoding A method (algorithm) for presenting characters in digital form by mapping sequences of code numbers of characters into sequences of octets. In the simplest case, each character is mapped to an integer in the range 0 - 255 according to a character code and these are used as such as octets. Naturally, this only works for character repertoires with at most 256 characters. For larger sets, more complicated encodings are needed. Encodings have names, which can be registered. Notice that a character code assumes or implicitly defines a character repertoire. A character encoding could, in principle, be viewed purely as a method of mapping a sequence of integers to a sequence of octets. However, quite often an encoding is specified in terms of a character code (and the implied character repertoire). The logical structure is still the following: 1. A character repertoire specifies a collection of characters, such as "a", "!", and "". 2. A character code defines numeric codes for characters in a repertoire. For example, in the ISO 10646 character code the numeric codes for "a", "!", "", and "" (per mille sign) are 97, 33, 228, and 8240. (Note: Especially the per mille sign, presenting 0/00 as a single character, can be shown incorrectly on display or on paper. That would be an illustration of the symptoms of the problems we are discussing.) 3. A character encoding defines how sequences of numeric codes are presented as (i.e., mapped to) sequences of octets. In one possible encoding for ISO 10646, the string a! is presented as the following sequence of octets (using two octets for each character): 0, 97, 0, 33, 0, 228, 32, 48. For a more rigorous explanation of these basic concepts, see Unicode Technical Report #17: Character Encoding Model. The phrase character set is used in a variety of meanings. It might denotes just a character repertoire but it may also refer to a character code, and quite often a particular character encoding is implied too. Unfortunately the word charset is used to refer to an encoding, causing much confusion. It is even the official term to be used in several contexts by Internet protocols, in MIME headers. Quite often the choice of a character repertoire, code, or encoding is presented as the choice of a language. For example, Web browsers typically confuse things quite a lot in this area. A pulldown menu in a program might be labeled "Languages", yet consist of character encoding choices (only). A language setting is quite distinct from character issues, although naturally each language has its own requirements on character repertoire. Even more seriously, programs and their documentation very often confuse the above-mentioned issues with the selection of a font.
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character repertoire, code, and encoding. Most character codes currently in use contain ASCII as their subset in some sense. ASCII is the safest character repertoire to be used in data transfer. However, not even all ASCII characters are "safe"! ASCII has been used and is used so widely that often the word ASCII refers to "text" or "plain text" in general, even if the character code is something else! The words "ASCII file" quite often mean any text file as opposite to a binary file. The definition of ASCII also specifies a set of control codes ("control characters") such as linefeed (LF) and escape (ESC). But the character repertoire proper, consisting of the printable characters of ASCII, is the following (where the first item is the blank, or space, character): ! 1 A Q a q " 2 B R b r # 3 C S c s $ 4 D T d t % 5 E U e u & 6 F V f v ' 7 G W g w ( 8 H X h x ) 9 I Y i y * : J Z j z + ; K [ k { , < L \ l | = M ] m } . > N ^ n ~ / ? O _ o
0 @ P ` p
The appearance of characters varies, of course, especially for some special characters. Some of the variation and other details are explained in The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes.
The international standard ISO 646 defines a character set similar to US-ASCII but with code positions corresponding to US-ASCII characters @[\]{|} as "national use positions". It also gives some liberties with characters #$^`~. The standard also defines "international reference version (IRV)", which is (in the 1991 edition of ISO 646) identical to US-ASCII. Ecma International has issued the ECMA-6 standard, which is equivalent to ISO 646 and is freely available on the Web. Within the framework of ISO 646, and partly otherwise too, several "national variants of ASCII" have been defined, assigning different letters and symbols to the "national use" positions. Thus, the characters that appear in those positions including those in US-ASCII - are somewhat "unsafe" in international data transfer, although this problem is losing significance. The trend is towards using the corresponding codes strictly for US-ASCII meanings; national characters are handled otherwise, giving them their own, unique and universal code positions in character codes larger than ASCII. But old software and devices may still reflect various "national variants of ASCII".
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The following table lists ASCII characters which might be replaced by other characters in national variants of ASCII. (That is, the code positions of these US-ASCII characters might be occupied by other characters needed for national use.) The lists of characters appearing in national variants are not intended to be exhaustive, just typical examples. dec 35 36 64 91 92 93 94 95 96 123 124 125 126 oct hex glyph official Unicode name NUMBER SIGN 43 23 # 44 24 DOLLAR SIGN $ COMMERCIAL AT 100 40 @ 133 5B LEFT SQUARE BRACKET [ REVERSE SOLIDUS 134 5C \ 135 5D RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET ] CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT 136 5E ^ 137 5F LOW LINE _ GRAVE ACCENT 140 60 ` 173 7B LEFT CURLY BRACKET { VERTICAL LINE 174 7C | 175 7D RIGHT CURLY BRACKET } TILDE 176 7E ~ ational variants | f _
Almost all of the characters used in the national variants have been incorporated into ISO Latin 1. Systems that support ISO Latin 1 in principle may still reflect the use of national variants of ASCII in some details; for example, an ASCII character might get printed or displayed according to some national variant. Thus, even "plain ASCII text" is thereby not always portable from one system or application to another. More information about national variants and their impact: Johan van Wingen: International standardization of 7-bit codes, ISO 646; contains a comparison table of national variants Digression on national 7-bit codes by Alan J. Flavell The ISO 646 page by Roman Czyborra Character tables by Koichi Yasuoka.
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The ISO 8859-1 standard (which is part of the ISO 8859 family of standards) defines a character repertoire identified as "Latin alphabet No. 1", commonly called "ISO Latin 1", as well as a character code for it. The repertoire contains the ASCII repertoire as a subset, and the code numbers for those characters are the same as in ASCII. The standard also specifies an encoding, which is similar to that of ASCII: each code number is presented simply as one octet. In addition to the ASCII characters, ISO Latin 1 contains various accented characters and other letters needed for writing languages of Western Europe, and some special characters. These characters occupy code positions 160 - 255, and they are:
Notes: The first of the characters above appears as space; it is the so-called no-break space. The presentation of some characters in copies of this document may be defective e.g. due to lack of font support. You may wish to compare the presentation of the characters on your browser with the character table presented as a GIF image in the famous ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup document. (In text only mode, you may wish to use my simple table of ISO Latin 1 which contains the names of the characters.) Naturally, the appearance of characters varies from one font to another. See also: The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes, which presents detailed characterizations of the meanings of the characters and comments on their usage in various contexts.
In the Windows character set, some positions in the range 128 - 159 are assigned to printable characters, such as "smart quotes", em dash, en dash, and trademark symbol. Thus, the character repertoire is larger than ISO Latin 1. The use of octets in the range 128 - 159 in any data to be processed by a program that expects ISO 8859-1 encoded data is an error which might cause just anything. They might for example get ignored, or be processed in a manner which looks meaningful, or be interpreted as control characters. See my document On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML for a discussion of the problems of using these characters. The Windows character set exists in different variations, or "code pages" (CP), which generally differ from the corresponding ISO 8859 standard so that it contains same characters in positions 128 - 159 as code page 1252. (However, there are some more differences between ISO 8859-7 and win-1253 (WinGreek).) See Code page &Co. by Roman Czyborra and Windows codepages by Microsoft. See also CP to Unicode mappings. What we have discussed here is the most usual one, resembling ISO 8859-1. Its status in the officially IANA registry was unclear; an encoding had been registered under the name ISO88591Windows3.1Latin1 by Hewlett-Packard (!), assumably intending to refer to WinLatin1, but in 1999-12 Microsoft finally registered it under the name windows1252. That name has in fact been widely used for it. (The name cp1252 has been used too, but it isn't officially registered even as an alias name.)
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ISO 8859-1 itself is just a member of the ISO 8859 family of character codes, which is nicely overviewed in Roman Czyborra's famous document The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup. The ISO 8859 codes extend the ASCII repertoire in different ways with different special characters (used in different languages and cultures). Just as ISO 8859-1 contains ASCII characters and a collection of characters needed in languages of western (and northern) Europe, there is ISO 8859-2 alias ISO Latin 2 constructed similarly for languages of central/eastern Europe, etc. The ISO 8859 character codes are isomorphic in the following sense: code positions 0 - 127 contain the same character as in ASCII, positions 128 - 159 are unused (reserved for control characters), and positions 160 - 255 are the varying part, used differently in different members of the ISO 8859 family. The ISO 8859 character codes are normally presented using the obvious encoding: each code position is presented as one octet. Such encodings have several alternative names in the official registry of character encodings, but the preferred ones are of the form ISO-8859-n. Although ISO 8859-1 has been a de facto default encoding in many contexts, it has in principle no special role. ISO 8859-15 alias ISO Latin 9 (!) was expected to replace ISO 8859-1 to a great extent, since it contains the politically important symbol for euro, but it seems to have little practical use. The following table lists the ISO 8859 alphabets, with links to more detailed descriptions. There is a separate document Coverage of European languages by ISO Latin alphabets which you might use to determine which (if any) of the alphabets are suitable for a document in a given language or combination of languages. My other material on ISO 8859 contains a combined character table, too. The parts of ISO 8859 standard ISO 8859-1 ISO 8859-2 ISO 8859-3 ISO 8859-4 ISO 8859-5 ISO 8859-6 ISO 8859-7 ISO 8859-8 ISO 8859-9 name of alphabet Latin alphabet No. 1 Latin alphabet No. 2 Latin alphabet No. 3 Latin alphabet No. 4 characterization "Western", "West European" "Central European", "East European" "South European"; "Maltese & Esperanto" "North European"
Latin/Cyrillic alphabet (for Slavic languages) Latin/Arabic alphabet Latin/Greek alphabet (for the Arabic language) (for modern Greek)
Latin/Hebrew alphabet (for Hebrew and Yiddish) Latin alphabet No. 5 "Turkish" "Nordic" (Smi, Inuit, Icelandic) (for the Thai language)
ISO 8859-13 Latin alphabet No. 7 ISO 8859-14 Latin alphabet No. 8 ISO 8859-15 Latin alphabet No. 9 ISO 8859-16 Latin alphabet No. 10
Notes: ISO 8859-n is Latin alphabet no. n for n=1,2,3,4, but this correspondence is broken for the other Latin alphabets. ISO 8859-16 is for use in Albanian, Croatian, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Irish Gaelic (new orthography), Italian, Latin, Polish, Romanian, and Slovenian. In particular, it contains letters s and t with comma below, in order to address an issue of writing Romanian. See the ISO/IEC JTC 1/ SC 2 site for the current status and proposed changes to the ISO 8859 set of standards.
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In MS DOS systems, different character codes are used; they are called "code pages". The original American code page was CP 437, which has e.g. some Greek letters, mathematical symbols, and characters which can be used as elements in simple pseudo-graphics. Later CP 850 became popular, since it contains letters needed for West European languages - largely the same letters as ISO 8859-1, but in different code positions. See DOS code page to Unicode mapping tables for detailed information. Note that DOS code pages are quite different from Windows character codes, though the latter are sometimes called with names like cp1252 (= windows1252)! For further confusion, Microsoft now prefers to use the notion "OEM code page" for the DOS character set used in a particular country. Macintosh character code On the Macs, the character code is more uniform than on PCs (although there are some national variants). The Mac character repertoire is a mixed combination of ASCII, accented letters, mathematical symbols, and other ingredients. See section Text in Mac OS 8 and 9 Developer Documentation. Notice that many of these are very different from ISO 8859-1. They may have different character repertoires, and the same character often has different code values in different codes. For example, code position 228 is occupied by (letter a with dieresis, or umlaut) in ISO 8859-1, by (Icelandic letter eth) in HP's Roman-8, by (letter o with tilde) in DOS code page 850, and per mille sign () in Macintosh character code. For information about several code pages, see Code page &Co. by Roman Czyborra. See also his excellent description of various Cyrillic encodings, such as different variants of KOI-8; most of them are extensions to ASCII, too. In general, full conversions between the character codes mentioned above are not possible. For example, the Macintosh character repertoire contains the Greek letter pi, which does not exist in ISO Latin 1 at all. Naturally, a text can be converted (by a simple program which uses a conversion table) from Macintosh character code to ISO 8859-1 if the text contains only those characters which belong to the ISO Latin 1 character repertoire. Text presented in Windows character code can be used as such as ISO 8859-1 encoded data if it contains only those characters which belong to the ISO Latin 1 character repertoire.
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Unicode is a standard, by the Unicode Consortium, which defines a character repertoire and character code intended to be fully compatible with ISO 10646, and an encoding for it. ISO 10646 is more general (abstract) in nature, whereas Unicode "imposes additional constraints on implementations to ensure that they treat characters uniformly across platforms and applications", as they say in section Unicode & ISO 10646 of the Unicode FAQ. Unicode was originally designed to be a 16-bit code, but it was extended so that currently code positions are expressed as integers in the hexadecimal range 0..10FFFF (decimal 0..1 114 111). That space is divided into 16-bit "planes". Until recently, the use of Unicode has mostly been limited to "Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)" consisting of the range 0..FFFF. The ISO 10646 and Unicode character repertoire can be regarded as a superset of most character repertoires in use. However, the code positions of characters vary from one character code to another.
Unicode database, a large (over 460 000 octets) plain text file listing Unicode character code positions, names, and
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defined character properties in a compact notation Informative annex E to ISO 10646-1:1993 (i.e., old version!), which lists, in alphabetic order, all character names (and the code positions) except Hangul and CJK ideographs; useful for finding out the code position when you know the (right!) name of a character. An online character database by Indrek Hein at the Institute of the Estonian Language. You can e.g. search for Unicode characters by name or code position and get the Unicode equivalents of characters in many widely used character sets. How to find an &#number; notation for a character; contains some additional information on how to find a Unicode number for a character
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important one is Microsoft's "Windows Glyph List 4" (WGL4), or "PanEuropean" character set, characterized on Microsoft's page Character sets and codepages and excellently listed on page Using Special Characters from Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) in HTML by Alan Wood.
The character concept is very fundamental for the issues discussed here but difficult to define exactly. The more fundamental concepts we use, the harder it is to give good definitions. (How would you define "life"? Or "structure"?) Here we will concentrate on clarifying the character concept by indicating what it does not imply.
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Widely used formatting control codes include carriage return (CR), linefeed (LF), and horizontal tab (HT), which in ASCII occupy code positions 13, 10, and 9. The names (or abbreviations) suggest generic meanings, but the actual meanings are defined partly in each character code definition, partly - and more importantly - by various other conventions "above" the character level. The "formatting" codes might be seen as a special case of device control, in a sense, but more naturally, a CR or a LF or a CR LF pair (to mention the most common conventions) when used in a text file simply indicates a new line. As regards to control codes used for line structuring, see Unicode technical report #13 Unicode ewline Guidelines. See also my Unicode line breaking rules: explanations and criticism. The HT (TAB) character is often used for real "tabbing" to some predefined writing position. But it is also used e.g. for indicating data boundaries, without any particular presentational effect, for example in the widely used "tab separated values" (TSV) data format.
A control code, or a "control character" cannot have a graphic presentation (a glyph) in the same way as normal characters have. However, in Unicode there is a separate block Control Pictures which contains characters that can be used to indicate the presence of a control code. They are of course quite distinct from the control codes they symbolize - U+241B SYMBOL FOR ESCAPE is not the same as U+001B ESCAPE! On the other hand, a control code might occasionally be displayed, by some programs, in a visible form, perhaps describing the control action rather than the code. For example, upon receiving octet 3 in the example situation above, a program might echo back (onto the terminal) *** or INTERRUPT or ^C. All such notations are program-specific conventions. Some control codes are sometimes named in a manner which seems to bind them to characters. In particular, control codes 1, 2, 3, ... are often called control-A, control-B, control-C, etc. (or CTRL-A or C-A or whatever). This is associated with the fact that on many keyboards, control codes can be produced (for sending to a computer) using a special key labeled "Control" or "Ctrl" or "CTR" or something like that together with letter keys A, B, C, ... This in turn is related to the fact that the code numbers of characters and control codes have been assigned so that the code of "Control-X" is obtained from the code of the upper case letter X by a simple operation (subtracting 64 decimal). But such things imply no real relationships between letters and control codes. The control code 3, or "Control-C", is not a variant of letter C at all, and its meaning is not associated with the meaning of C.
This is ultimately a matter of definition: a definition of a character repertoire specifies the "identity" of characters, among other things. One could define a repertoire where uppercase Z and lowercase z are just two glyphs for the same character. On the other hand, one could define that italic Z is a character different from normal Z, not just a different glyph for it. In fact, in Unicode for example there are several characters which could be regarded as typographic variants of letters only, but for various reasons Unicode defines them as separate characters. For example, mathematicians use a variant of letter N to denote the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, ...), and this variant is defined as being a separate character ("double-struck capital N") in Unicode. There are some more notes on the identity of characters below. The design of glyphs has several aspects, both practical and esthetic. For an interesting review of a major company's description of its principles and practices, see Microsoft's Character design standards (in its typography pages).
Some discussions, such as ISO 9541-1 and ISO/EC TR 15285, make a further distinction between "glyph image", which is an actual appearance of a glyph, and "glyph", which is a more abstract notion. In such an approach, "glyph" is close to the concept of "character", except that a glyph may present a combination of several characters. Thus, in that approach, the abstract characters "f" and "i" might be represented using an abstract glyph that combines the two characters into a ligature, which itself might have different physical manifestations. Such approaches need to be treated as different from the issue of treating ligatures as (compatibility) characters.
What's in a name?
The names of characters are assigned identifiers rather than definitions. Typically the names are selected so that they contain only letters A - Z, spaces, and hyphens; often uppercase variant is the reference spelling of a character name. (See naming guidelines of the UCS.) The same character may have different names in different definitions of character repertoires. Generally the name is intended to suggest a generic meaning and scope of use. But the Unicode standard warns (mentioning FULL STOP as an example of a character with varying usage): A character may have a broader range of use than the most literal interpretation of its name might indicate; coded representation, name, and representative glyph need to be taken in context when establishing the semantics of a character.
Glyph variation
When a character repertoire is defined (e.g. in a standard), some particular glyph is often used to describe the appearance
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of each character, but this should be taken as an example only. The Unicode standard specifically says (in section 3.2) that great variation is allowed between "representative glyph" appearing in the standard and a glyph used for the corresponding character: Consistency with the representative glyph does not require that the images be identical or even graphically similar; rather, it means that both images are generally recognized to be representations of the same character. Representing the character U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A by the glyph "X" would violate its character identity. Thus, the definition of a repertoire is not a matter of just listing glyphs, but neither is it a matter of defining exactly the meanings of characters. It's actually an exception rather than a rule that a character repertoire definition explicitly says something about the meaning and use of a character. Possibly some specific properties (e.g. being classified as a letter or having numeric value in the sense that digits have) are defined, as in the Unicode database, but such properties are rather general in nature. This vagueness may sound irritating, and it often is. But an essential point to be noted is that quite a lot of information is implied. You are expected to deduce what the character is, using both the character name and its representative glyph, and perhaps context too, like the grouping of characters under different headings like "currency symbols". For more information on the glyph concept, see the document An operational model for characters and glyphs (ISO/IEC TR 15285:1998) and Apple's document Characters, Glyphs, and Related Terms
Fonts
A repertoire of glyphs comprises a font. In a more technical sense, as the implementation of a font, a font is a numbered set of glyphs. The numbers correspond to code positions of the characters (presented by the glyphs). Thus, a font in that sense is character code dependent. An expression like "Unicode font" refers to such issues and does not imply that the font contains glyphs for all Unicode characters. It is possible that a font which is used for the presentation of some character repertoire does not contain a different glyph for each character. For example, although characters such as Latin uppercase A, Cyrillic uppercase A, and Greek uppercase alpha are regarded as distinct characters (with distinct code values) in Unicode, a particular font might contain just one A which is used to present all of them. (For information about fonts, there is a very large comp.font FAQ, but it's rather old: last update in 1996. The Finding Fonts for Internationalization FAQ is dated, too.) You should never use a character just because it "ooks right"or "almost right". Characters with quite different purposes l and meanings may well look similar, or almost similar, in some fonts at least. Using a character as a surrogate for another for the sake of apparent similarity may lead to great confusion. Consider, for example, the so-called sharp s (es-zed), which is used in the German language. Some people who have noticed such a character in the ISO Latin 1 repertoire have thought "vow, here we have the beta character!". In many fonts, the sharp s () really looks more or less like the Greek lowercase beta character (). But it must not be used as a surrogate for beta. You wouldn't get very far with it, really; what's the big idea of having beta without alpha and all the other Greek letters? More seriously, the use of sharp s in place of beta would confuse text searches, spelling checkers, speech synthesizers, indexers, etc.; an automatic converter might well turn sharp s into ss; and some font might present sharp s in a manner which is very different from beta. For some more explanations on this, see section Why should we be so strict about meanings of characters? in The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes.
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(which "sees" the code values, through some encoding, and not the glyphs at all). Notice that Unicode does not make any distinction e.g. between the GREEK SMALL LETTER PI (), and the mathematical symbol pi denoting the well-known constant 3.14159... (i.e. there is no separate symbol for the latter). For the OHM SIGN (), there is a specific character (in the Symbols Area), but it is defined as being canonical equivalent to GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA ( ), i.e. there are two separate characters but they are equivalent). On the other hand, it makes a distinction between GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI () and the mathematical symbol N-ARY PRODUCT (), so that they are not equivalents. If you think this doesn't sound quite logical, you are not the only one to think so. But the point is that for symbols resembling Greek letter and used in various contexts, there are three possibilities in Unicode: the symbol is regarded as identical to the Greek letter (just as its particular usage) the symbol is included as a separate character but only for compatibility and as compatibility equivalent to the Greek letter the symbol is regarded as a completely separate character. You need to check the Unicode references for information about each individual symbol. Note in particular that a query to Indrek Hein's online character database will give such information in the decomposition info part (but only in the entries for compatibility characters!). As a rough rule of thumb about symbols looking like Greek letters, mathematical operators (like summation) exist as independent characters whereas symbols of quantities and units (like pi and ohm) are equivalent or identical to Greek letters.
Compatibility characters
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There is a large number of compatibility characters in ISO 10646 and Unicode which are variants of other characters. They were included for compatibility with other standards so that data presented using some other code can be converted to ISO 10646 and back without losing information. The Unicode standard says (in section 2.4): Compatibility characters are those that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards. They are variants of characters that already have encodings as normal (that is, non-compatibility) characters in the Unicode Standard. There is a large number of compatibility characters in the Compatibility Area but also scattered around the Unicode space. Many, but not all, compatibility characters have compatibility decompositions. The Unicode database contains, for each character, a field (the sixth one) which specifies its eventual compatibility decomposition. Thus, to take a simple example, SUPERSCRIPT TWO () is an ISO Latin 1 character with its own code position in that standard. In ISO 10646 way of thinking, it would have been treated as just a superscript variant of DIGIT TWO. But since the character is contained in an important standard, it was included into ISO 10646, though only as a "compatibility character". The practical reason is that now one can convert from ISO Latin 1 to ISO 10646 and back and get the original data. This does not mean that in the ISO 10646 philosophy superscripting (or subscripting, italics, bolding etc.) would be irrelevant; rather, they are to be handled at another level of data presentation, such as some special markup. There is a document titled Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages and produced jointly by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Unicode Consortium. It discusses, among other things, characters with compatibility mappings: should they be used, or should the corresponding non-compatibility characters be used, perhaps with some markup and/or style sheet that corresponds to the difference between them. The answers depend on the nature of the characters and the available markup and styling techniques. For example, for superscripts, the use of sup markup (as in HTML) is recommended, i.e. <sup>2</sup> is preferred over sup2; This is a debatable issue; see my notes on sup and sub markup. The definition of Unicode indicates our sample character, SUPERSCRIPT TWO, as a compatibility character with the compatibility decomposition "<super> + 0032 2". Here "<super>" is a semi-formal way of referring to what is considered as typographic variation, in this case superscript style, and "0032 2" shows the hexadecimal code of a character and the character itself. Some compatibility characters have compatibility decompositions consisting of several characters. Due to this property, they can be said to represent ligatures in the broad sense. For example, LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI (U+FB01) has the obvious decomposition consisting of letters "f" and "i". It is still a distinct character in Unicode, but in the spirit of Unicode, we should not use it except for storing and transmitting existing data which contains that character. Generally, ligature issues should be handled outside the character level, e.g. selected automatically by a formatting program or indicated using some suitable markup. Note that the word ligature can be misleading when it appears in a character name. In particular, the old name of the character "", LATIN SMALL LETTER AE (U+00E6), is LATIN SMALL LIGATURE AE, but it is not a ligature of "a" and "e" in the sense described above. It has no compatibility decomposition. In comp.fonts FAQ, General Info (2/6) section 1.15 Ligatures, the term ligature is defined as follows:
A ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. Generally, ligatures replace characters that occur next to each other when they share common components. Ligatures are a subset of a more general class of figures called "contextual forms."
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handle simple combinations reasonably. See test page for combining diacritic marks in Alan Wood's Unicode resources. Regarding advanced implementation of the rendering of characters with diacritic marks, consult Unicode Technical Note #2, A General Method for Rendering Combining Marks. Using combining diacritic marks, we have wide range of possibilities. We can put, say, a diaeresis on a gamma, although "Greek small letter gamma with diaeresis" does not exist as a character. The combination U+03B3 U+0308 consists of two characters, although its visual presentation looks like a single character in the same sense as "" looks like a single character. This is how your browser displays the combination: "". In most browsing situations at present, it probably isn't displayed correctly; you might see e.g. the letter gamma followed by a box that indicates a missing glyph, or you might see gamma followed by a diaeresis shown separately (). Thus, in practical terms, in order to use a character with a diacritic mark, you should primarily try to find it as a precomposed character. A precomposed character, also called composite character or decomposable character, is one that has a code position (and thereby identity) of its own but is in some sense equivalent to a sequence of other characters. There are lots of them in Unicode, and they cover the needs of most (but not all) languages of the world, but not e.g. the presentation of the International phonetic alphabet by IPA which, in its general form, requires several different diacritic marks. For example, the character LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS (U+00E4, ) is, by Unicode definition, decomposable to the sequence of the two characters LATIN SMALL LETTER A (U+0061) and COMBINING DIAERESIS (U+0308). This is at present mostly a theoretic possibility. Generally by decomposing all decomposable characters one could in many cases simplify the processing of textual data (and the resulting data might be converted back to a format using precomposed characters). See e.g. the working draft Character Model for the World Wide Web.
Typing characters
Just pressing a key?
Typing characters on a computer may appear deceptively simple: you press a key labeled "A", and the character "A" appears on the screen. Well, you actually get uppercase "A" or lowercase "a" depending on whether you used the shift key or not, but that's common knowledge. You also expect "A" to be included into a disk file when you save what you are typing, you expect "A" to appear on paper if you print your text, and you expect "A" to be sent if you send your product by E-mail or something like that. And you expect the recipient to see an "A". Thus far, you should have learned that the presentation of a character in computer storage or disk or in data transfer may vary a lot. You have probably realized that especially if it's not the common "A" but something more special (say, an "A" with an accent), strange things might happen, especially if data is not accompanied with adequate information about its encoding. But you might still be too confident. You probably expect that on your system at least things are simpler than that. If you use your very own very personal computer and press the key labeled "A" on its keyboard, then shouldn't it be evident that in its storage and processor, on its disk, on its screen it's invariably "A"? Can't you just ignore its internal character code and character encoding? Well, probably yes - with "A". I wouldn't be so sure about "", for instance. (On Windows systems, for example, DOS mode programs differ from genuine Windows programs in this respect; they use a DOS character code.) When you press a key on your keyboard, then what actually happens is this. The keyboard sends the code of a character to the processor. The processor then, in addition to storing the data internally somewhere, normally sends it to the display device. (For more details on this, as regards to one common situation, see Example: What Happens When You Press A Key in The PC Guide.) Now, the keyboard settings and the display settings might be different from what you expect. Even if a key is labeled "", it might send something else than the code of "" in the character code used in your computer. Similarly, the display device, upon receiving such a code, might be set to display something different. Such mismatches are usually undesirable, but they are definitely possible. Moreover, there are often keyboard restrictions. If your computer uses internally, say, ISO Latin 1 character repertoire, you probably won't find keys for all 191 characters in it on your keyboard. And for Unicode, it would be quite impossible to have a key for each character! Different keyboards are used, often according to the needs of particular languages. For example, keyboards used in Sweden often have a key for the character but seldom a key for ; in Spain the opposite is true. Quite often some keys have multiple uses via various "composition" keys, as explained below. For an illustration of the variation, as well as to see what layout might be used in some environments, see International Keyboards at Terena (contains some errors) Keyboard layouts by HermesSOFT Alternative Keyboard Layouts at USCC
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Keyboard layouts documented by Mark Leisher; contains several layouts for "exotic" languages too The interactive Windows Layouts page by Microsoft; requires Internet Explorer with JavaScript enabled. (Actually, using it I found out new features in the Finnish keyboard I have: I can use Alt Gr m to produce the micro sign , although there is no hint about this in the "m" key itself.) In several systems, including MS Windows, it is possible to switch between different keyboard settings. This means that the effects of different keys do not necessarily correspond to the engravings in the key caps but to some other assignments. To ease typing in such situations, "virtual keyboards" can be used. This means that an image of a keyboard is visible on the screen, letting the user type characters by clicking on keys in it or using the information to see the current assignments of the keys of the physical keyboard. For the Office software on Windows systems, there is a free add-in available for this: Microsoft Visual Keyboard.
The last method above could often be called "device dependent" rather than program specific, since the program that performs the conversion might be a keyboard driver. In that case, normal programs would have all their input from the keyboard processed that way. This method may also involve the use of auxiliary keys for typing characters with diacritic marks such as "". Such an auxiliary key is often called dead key, since just pressing it causes nothing; it works only in combination with some other key. A more official name for a dead key is modifier key. For example, depending on the keyboard and the driver, you might be able to produce "" by pressing first a key labeled with the acute accent (), then the "a" key.
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My keyboard has two keys for such purposes. There's the accent key, with the acute accent and the grave accent (`) as "upper case" character, meaning I need to use the shift key for the grave. And there's a key with the dieresis () and the circumflex (^) above it (i.e. as "upper case") and the tilde (~) below or left to it (meaning I need to use Alt Gr for it), so I can produce ISO Latin 1 characters with those diacritics. Note that this does not involve any operation on the characters `^~, and the keyboard does not send those characters at all in such situations. If I try to enter that way a character outside the ISO Latin 1 repertoire, I get just the diacritic as a separate character followed by the normal character, e.g. "^j". To enter the diacritic itself, such as the tilde (~), I may need to press the space bar so that the tilde diacritic combines with the blank (producing ~) instead of a letter (producing e.g. ""). Your situation may well be different, in part or entirely. For example, a typical French keyboard has separate keys for those accented letters that are used in French (e.g. ""), but the accents themselves can be difficult to produce. You might need to type AltGr followed by a space to produce the grave accent `.
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Instead, the file contains the "escape" notation as a character sequence, which will then be interpreted in a specific way by programs like a Web browser or a C compiler. One can in a sense regard the "escape notations" as encodings used in specific contexts upon specific agreements. There are also "escape notations" which are to be interpreted by human readers directly. For example, when sending E-mail one might use A" (letter A followed by a quotation mark) as a surrogate for (letter A with dieresis), or one might use AE instead of . The reader is assumed to understand that e.g. A" on display actually means . Quite often the purpose is to use ASCII characters only, so that the typing, transmission, and display of the characters is "safe". But this typically means that text becomes very messy; the Finnish word Hmlinen does not look too good or readable when written as Ha" a"a"nen or Haemaelaeinen. Such usage is based on special (though often implicit) conventions and can cause a lot of m l i confusion when there is no mutual agreement on the conventions, especially because there are so many of them. (For example, to denote letter a with acute accent, , a convention might use the apostrophe, a', or the solidus, a/, or the acute accent, a, or something else.) There is an old proposal by K. Simonsen, Character Mnemonics & Character Sets, published as RFC 1345, which lists a large number of "escape notations" for characters. They are very short, typically two characters, e.g. A: for and th for (thorn). Naturally there's the problem that the reader must know whether e.g. th is to be understood that way or as two letters t and h. So the system is primarily for referring to characters (see below), but under suitable circumstances it could also be used for actually writing texts, when the ambiguities can somehow be removed by additional conventions or by context. RFC 1345 cannot be regarded as official or widely known, but if you need, for some applications, an "escape scheme", you might consider using those notations instead of reinventing the wheel.
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few words of explanation in an E-mail message body, is better than nothing. But since data is processed by programs which cannot understand such notes, the encoding should be specified in a standardized computer-readable form.
MIME headers
The ContentType information is an example of information in a header. Headers relate to some data, describing its presentation and other things, but are passed as logically separate from it. Possible headers and their contents are defined in the basic MIME specification, RFC 2045. Adequate headers should normally be generated automatically by the software which sends the data (such as a program for sending E-mail, or a Web server) and interpreted automatically by receiving software (such as a program for reading E-mail, or a Web browser). In E-mail messages, headers precede the message body; it depends on the E-mail program whether and how it displays the headers. For Web documents, a Web server is required to send headers when it delivers a document to a browser (or other user agent) which has sent a request for the document. In addition to media types and character encodings, MIME addresses several other aspects too. Earl Hood has composed the documentation Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME, which contains the basic RFCs on MIME in hypertext format and a common table of contents for them.
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the = sign and the two digits of the hexadecimal notation of n. If QP encoding is applied to a sequence of octets presenting character data according to ISO 8859-1 character code, then effectively this means that most ASCII characters (including all ASCII letters) are preserved as such whereas e.g. the ISO 8859-1 character (code position 228 in decimal, E4 in hexadecimal) is encoded as =E4. (For obvious reasons, the equals sign = itself is among the few ASCII characters which are encoded. Being in code position 61 in decimal, 3D in hexadecimal, it is encoded as =3D.) Notice that encoding ISO 8859-1 data this way means that the character code is the one specified by the ISO 8859-1 standard, whereas the character encoding is different from the one specified (or at least suggested) in that standard. Since QP only specifies the mapping of a sequence of octets to another sequence of octets, it is a pure encoding and can be applied to any character data, or to any data for that matter. Naturally, Quoted-Printable encoding needs to be processed by a program which knows it and can convert it to humanreadable form. It looks rather confusing when displayed as such. Roughly speaking, one can expect most E-mail programs to be able to handle QP, but the same does not apply to newsreaders (or Web browsers). Therefore, you should normally use QP in E-mail only.
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usage, and the next two usages below, is (usually) not directly caused by incorrect implementations but by the human writer; however, it is indirectly caused by them. Similarly to the above-mentioned case, this is usually an attempt to avoid writing "". For some languages (e.g. German), using "ae" as a surrogate for "" works to some extent, but it is much less applicable to Swedish or Finnish - and loses information, since the letter pair "ae" can genuinely occur in many words. Yet another surrogate. It resembles an old (and generally outdated) idea of using the quotation mark as a diacritic mark too in ASCII but it is probably expected to be understood by humans instead of being converted to an "" by a program. The original data was actually ISO 8859-1 encoded or something similar (e.g. Windows encoded) but during data transfer the most significant bit of each octet was lost. (Such things may happen in systems for transferring, or "gatewaying", data from one network to another. Sometimes it might be your terminal that has been configured to "mask out" the most significant bit!) This means that the octet representing "" in ISO 8859-1, i.e. 228, became 228 - 128 = 100, which is the ISO 8859-1 encoding of letter d. Obviously, the data is in ASCII encoding so that the character "{" is used in place of "". Earlier it was common to use various national variants of ASCII, with characters #$@[\]^_`{|}~ replaced by national characters according to the needs of a particular language. Thus they modified the character repertoire of ASCII by dropping out some special characters and introducing national characters into their ASCII code positions. It requires further study to determine the actual encoding used, since e.g. Swedish, German and Finnish ASCII variants all have "" as a replacement for "{", but there are differences in other replacements. The data is evidently in UTF-8 encoding. Notice that the characters and stand here for octets 195 and 164, which might be displayed differently depending on program and device used. The data is in UTF-7 encoding. The data is most probably in Roman-8 encoding (defined by Hewlett-Packard). The data is in Quoted-Printable encoding. The original encoding, upon which the QP encoding was applied, might be ISO 8859-1, or any other encoding which represents character "" in the same way as ISO 8859-1 (i.e. as octet 228 decimal, E4 hexadecimal). The data is in HTML format; the encoding may vary. The notation ä is a so-called character entity reference. The data is in HTML format; the encoding may vary. The notation ä is a so-called numeric character reference. (Notice that 228 is the code position for in Unicode.) This character occupies code position 228 in the Macintosh character code. Thus, what has probably happened is that some program has received some ISO 8859-1 encoded data and interpreted it as if it were in Mac encoding, then performed some conversion based on that interpretation. Since PER MILLE SIGN is not an ISO 8859-1 character, your program is actually not applying ISO 8859-1 interpretation. Perhaps an erroneous conversion turned 228 into 137, which is the code position of the per mille sign in the Windows character code. Windows programs usually interpret data according that code even when they are said to apply ISO 8859-1. This character occupies code position 228 in DOS code page 437. Since GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA is not an ISO 8859-1 character, your program is actually not applying ISO 8859-1 interpretation, for some reason. Perhaps it is interpreting the data according to DOS CP 437, or perhaps the data had been incorrectly converted to some encoding where sigma has a presentation. Perhaps the data was encoded in DOS encoding (e.g. code page 850), where the code for "" is 132. In ISO 8859-1, octet 132 is in the area reserved for control characters; typically such octets are not displayed at all, or perhaps displayed as blank. If you can access the data in binary form, you could find
ae
a"
+AOQ
=E4
ä
ä
(capital sigma)
nothing
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evidence for this hypothesis by noticing that octets 132 actually appear there. (For instance, the Emacs editor would display such an octet as \204, since 204 is the octal notation for 132.) If, on the other hand, it's not octet 132 but octet 138, then the data is most probably in Macintosh encoding. (double low-9 quotation mark) Most probably the data was encoded in DOS encoding (e.g. code page 850), where the code for "" is 132. Your program is not actually interpreting the data as ISO 8859-1 encoded but according to the so-called Windows character code, where this code position is occupied by the DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK. Most probably the data was encoded in Macintosh encoding, where the code for "" is 138. Your program is not actually interpreting the data as ISO 8859-1 encoded but according to the so-called Windows character code, where this code position is occupied by the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON.
To illustrate what may happen when text is sent in a grossly invalid form, consider the following example. I'm sending myself E-mail, using Netscape 4.0 (on Windows 95). In the mail composition window, I set the encoding to UTF-8. The body of my message is simply Tm on testi. (That's Finnish for 'This is a test'. The second and fourth character is letter a with umlaut.) Trying to read the mail on my Unix account, using the Pine E-mail program (popular among Unix users), I see the following (when in "full headers" mode; irrelevant headers omitted here): XMailer: Mozilla 4.0 [en] (Win95; I) MIMEVersion: 1.0 To: jkorpela@cs.tut.fi Subject: Test XPriority: 3 (Normal) ContentType: text/plain; charset=xUNICODE20UTF7 ContentTransferEncoding: 7bit [The following text is in the "xUNICODE20UTF7" character set] [Your display is set for the "ISO88591" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] T+O6Q on testi. Interesting, isn't it? I specifically requested UTF-8 encoding, but Netscape used UTF-7. And it did not include a correct header, since xUNICODE20UTF7 is not a registered "charset" name. Even if the encoding had been a registered one, there would have been no guarantee that my E-mail program would have been able to handle the encoding. The example, "T+O6Q-" instead of "Tm", illustrates what may happen when an octet sequence is interpreted according to another encoding than the intended one. In fact, it is difficult to say what Netscape was really doing, since it seems to encode incorrectly. A correct UTF-7 encoding for "Tm" would be "T+AOQ-m+AOQ-". The "+" and "-" characters correspond to octets indicating a switch to "shifted encoding" and back from it. The shifted encoding is based on presenting Unicode values first as 16-bit binary integers, then regrouping the bits and presenting the resulting six-bit groups as octets according to a table specified in RFC 2045 in the section on Base64. See also RFC 2152.
Practical conclusions
Whenever text data is sent over a network, the sender and the recipient should have a joint agreement on the character encoding used. In the optimal case, this is handled by the software automatically, but in reality the users need to take some precautions. Most importantly, make sure that any Internet-related software that you use to send data specifies the encoding correctly in suitable headers. There are two things involved: the header must be there and it must reflect the actual encoding used; and the encoding used must be one that is widely understood by the (potential) recipients' software. One must often make compromises as regards to the latter aim: you may need to use an encoding which is not yet widely supported to get your message through at all. It is useful to find out how to make your Web browser, newsreader, and E-mail program so that you can display the
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encoding information for the page, article, or message you are reading. (For example, on Netscape use View Page Info; on News Xpress, use View Raw Format; on Pine, use h.) If you use, say, Netscape to send E-mail or to post to Usenet news, make sure it sends the message in a reasonable form. In particular, make sure it does not send the message as HTML or duplicate it by sending it both as plain text and as HTML (select plain text only). As regards to character encoding, make sure it is something widely understood, such as ASCII, some ISO 8859 encoding, or UTF-8, depending on how large character repertoire you need. In particular, avoid sending data in a proprietary encoding (like the Macintosh encoding or a DOS encoding) to a public network. At the very least, if you do that, make sure that the message heading specifies the encoding! There's nothing wrong with using such an encoding within a single computer or in data transfer between similar computers. But when sent to Internet, data should be converted to a more widely known encoding, by the sending program. If you cannot find a way to configure your program to do that, get another program.
As regards to other forms of transfer of data in digital form, such as diskettes, information about encoding is important, too. The problem is typically handled by guesswork. Often the crucial thing is to know which program was used to generate the data, since the text data might be inside a file in, say, the MS Word format which can only be read by (a suitable version of) MS Word or by a program which knows its internal data format. That format, once recognized, might contain information which specifies the character encoding used in the text data included; or it might not, in which case one has to ask the sender, or make a guess, or use trial and error - viewing the data using different encodings until something sensible appears.
Further reading
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets by Joel on Software. An enjoyable nice treatise, though probably not quite the absolute minimum. Character Encodings Concepts, adapted from a presentation by Peter Edberg at a Unicode conference. Old, but a rich source of information, with good illustrations. ISO-8859 briefing and resources by Alan J. Flavell. Partly a character set tutorial, partly a discussion of specific (especially ISO 8859 and HTML related) issues in depth. Section Character set standards in the Standards and Specifications List by Diffuse (archive copy) Guide to Character Sets, by Diffuse. (archive copy) Google's section on internalization, which has interesting entries like i18nGurus " haracter Set"Considered Harmful by Dan Connolly. A good discussion of the basic concepts and misconceptions. C The ature of Linguistic Data: Multilingual Computing - an old (1997) collection of annotated links to information on character codes, fonts, etc. John Clews: Digital Language Access: Scripts, Transliteration, and Computer Access; an introduction to scripts and transliteration, so it's useful background information for character code issues. Michael Everson's Web site, which contains a lot of links to detailed documents on character code issues, especially progress and proposals in standardization. Johan W. van Wingen: Character sets. Letters, tokens and codes. Detailed information on many topics (including particular character codes). Steven J. Searle: A Brief History of Character Codes in orth America, Europe, and East Asia Ken Lunde: CJKV Information Processing. A book on Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing. The book itself is not online, but some extracts are, e.g. the overview chapter. An online character database by Indrek Hein at the Institute of the Estonian Language. You can e.g. search for Unicode characters by name or code position, get lists of differences between some character sets, and get lists of characters needed for different languages. Free recode is a free program by Franois Pinard. It can be used to perform various character code conversions between a large number of encodings. Character code problems are part of a topic called internationalization (jocularly abbreviated as i18n), rather misleadingly, because it mainly revolves around the problems of using various languages and writing systems (scripts). (Typically international communication on the Internet is carried out in English!) It includes difficult questions like text directionality (some languages are written right to left) and requirements to present the same character with different glyphs according to its context. See W3C pages on internationalization. I originally started writing this document as a tutorial for HTML authors. Later I noticed that this general information is
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extensive enough to be put into a document of its own. As regards to HTML specific problems, the document Using national and special characters in HTML summarizes what currently seems to be the best alternative in the general case. Acknowledgements I have learned a lot about character set issues from the following people (listed in an order which is roughly chronological by the start of their influence on my understanding of these things): Timo Kiravuo, Alan J. Flavell, Arjun Ray, Roman Czyborra, Bob Bemer, Erkki I. Kolehmainen. (But any errors in this document I souped up by myself.)
Date of last revision: 2001-09-06. Date of last update: 2009-03-11. This page belongs to section Characters and encodings of the free information site IT and communication by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela.
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