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62-517: Prior to the Unicode era, the following Harvard-Kyoto scheme was developed for putting a fairly large amount of Sanskrit textual material into machine readable format without the use of diacritics as used in IAST . Instead of diacritics it uses upper case letters. Since it employs both upper and lower case letters in its scheme, proper nouns' first letter capitalization format cannot be followed. Because it

124-519: A followed by u ) from औ (the diphthong au ). However such a vowel hiatus would occur extremely rarely inside words. Such a hiatus most often occurs in sandhi between two words (e.g. a sandhi of a word ending in 'aH' and one beginning with 'i' or 'u'). Since in such a situation a text transliterated in Harvard-Kyoto would introduce a space between the 'a' and 'i' (or 'a' and 'u') no ambiguity would result. This method allows not only determining

186-498: A block is always a multiple of 16, and is often a multiple of 128, but is otherwise arbitrary. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over several different, potentially disjunct blocks within the codespace. Each code point is assigned a classification, listed as the code point's General Category property. Here, at the uppermost level code points are categorized as one of Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator, or Other. Under each category, each code point

248-727: A calendar year and with rare cases where the scheduled release had to be postponed. For instance, in April 2020, a month after version 13.0 was published, the Unicode Consortium announced they had changed the intended release date for version 14.0, pushing it back six months to September 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Unicode 16.0, the latest version, was released on 10 September 2024. It added 5,185 characters and seven new scripts: Garay , Gurung Khema , Kirat Rai , Ol Onal , Sunuwar , Todhri , and Tulu-Tigalari . Thus far,

310-432: A comprehensive catalog of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text , as well as visual charts and reference data sets to aid implementers. Previously, The Unicode Standard was sold as a print volume containing the complete core specification, standard annexes, and code charts. However, version 5.0, published in 2006, was the last version printed this way. Starting with version 5.2, only

372-575: A full semantic duplicate of the Latin alphabet, because legacy CJK encodings contained both "fullwidth" (matching the width of CJK characters) and "halfwidth" (matching ordinary Latin script) characters. The Unicode Bulldog Award is given to people deemed to be influential in Unicode's development, with recipients including Tatsuo Kobayashi , Thomas Milo, Roozbeh Pournader , Ken Lunde , and Michael Everson . The origins of Unicode can be traced back to

434-442: A large number of scripts, and not with all of the scripts supported being treated in a consistent manner. The philosophy that underpins Unicode seeks to encode the underlying characters— graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than graphical distinctions considered mere variant glyphs thereof, that are instead best handled by the typeface , through the use of markup , or by some other means. In particularly complex cases, such as

496-441: A left-to-right language such as English is embedded in them; or vice versa, if Arabic is embedded in a left-to-right script such as English. Bidirectional script support is the capability of a computer system to correctly display bidirectional text. The term is often shortened to " BiDi " or " bidi ". Early computer installations were designed only to support a single writing system , typically for left-to-right scripts based on

558-534: A low-surrogate code point forms a surrogate pair in UTF-16 in order to represent code points greater than U+FFFF . In principle, these code points cannot otherwise be used, though in practice this rule is often ignored, especially when not using UTF-16. A small set of code points are guaranteed never to be assigned to characters, although third-parties may make independent use of them at their discretion. There are 66 of these noncharacters : U+FDD0 – U+FDEF and

620-462: A paragraph separator, or a "pop" character. If a "weak" character is followed by another "weak" character, the algorithm will look at the first neighbouring "strong" character. Sometimes this leads to unintentional display errors. These errors are corrected or prevented with "pseudo-strong" characters. Such Unicode control characters are called marks . The mark ( U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK (LRM) or U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK (RLM))

682-421: A part of the standard. Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters. Unicode has largely supplanted the previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets , each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode

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744-466: A piece of text is to be treated as directionally distinct. The text within the scope of the embedding formatting characters is not independent of the surrounding text. Also, characters within an embedding can affect the ordering of characters outside. Unicode 6.3 recognized that directional embeddings usually have too strong an effect on their surroundings and are thus unnecessarily difficult to use. The "isolate" directional formatting characters signal that

806-435: A piece of text is to be treated as directionally isolated from its surroundings. As of Unicode 6.3, these are the formatting characters that are being encouraged in new documents – once target platforms are known to support them. These formatting characters were introduced after it became apparent that directional embeddings usually have too strong an effect on their surroundings and are thus unnecessarily difficult to use. Unlike

868-535: A project run by 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. The Unicode Consortium together with the ISO have developed a shared repertoire following the initial publication of The Unicode Standard : Unicode and

930-399: A properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose. This design decision was made based on the assumption that only scripts and characters in "modern" use would require encoding: 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

992-434: A text. The exclusion of surrogates and noncharacters leaves 1 111 998 code points available for use. Bidirectional text#Unicode bidi support A bidirectional text contains two text directionalities , right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets , but may also refer to boustrophedon , which is changing text direction in each row. An example

1054-558: A total of 168 scripts are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets , abugidas and syllabaries ), although there are still scripts that are not yet encoded, particularly those 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, Ken Whistler, V.S. Umamaheswaran) maintain

1116-654: A universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned. Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development. Full members include most of the main computer software and hardware companies (and few others) with any interest in text-processing standards, including Adobe , Apple , Google , IBM , Meta (previously as Facebook), Microsoft , Netflix , and SAP . Over

1178-413: Is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding". In this document, entitled Unicode 88 , Becker outlined a scheme using 16-bit characters: 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

1240-448: Is not added, the weak character ™ will be neighbored by a strong LTR character and a strong RTL character. Hence, in an RTL context, it will be considered to be RTL, and displayed in an incorrect order (e.g. " قرأ Misplaced Pages™ طوال اليوم. "). The "embedding" directional formatting characters are the classical Unicode method of explicit formatting, and as of Unicode 6.3, are being discouraged in favor of "isolates". An "embedding" signals that

1302-457: Is not padded. There are a total of 2 + (2 − 2 ) = 1 112 064 valid code points within the codespace. (This number arises from the limitations of the UTF-16 character encoding, which can encode the 2 code points in the range U+0000 through U+FFFF except for the 2 code points in the range U+D800 through U+DFFF , which are used as surrogate pairs to encode the 2 code points in

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1364-598: Is possible to simply flip the left-to-right display order to a right-to-left display order, but doing this sacrifices the ability to correctly display left-to-right scripts. With bidirectional script support, it is possible to mix characters from different scripts on the same page, regardless of writing direction. In particular, the Unicode standard provides foundations for complete BiDi support, with detailed rules as to how mixtures of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts are to be encoded and displayed. The Unicode standard calls for characters to be ordered 'logically', i.e. in

1426-480: Is projected to include 4301 new unified CJK characters . The Unicode Standard defines a codespace : a sequence of integers called code points in the range from 0 to 1 114 111 , notated according to the standard as U+0000 – U+10FFFF . The codespace is a systematic, architecture-independent representation of The Unicode Standard ; actual text is processed as binary data via one of several Unicode encodings, such as UTF-8 . In this normative notation,

1488-606: Is the RTL Hebrew name Sarah: שרה, spelled sin (ש) on the right, resh (ר) in the middle, and heh (ה) on the left. Many computer program failed to display this correctly, because they were designed to display text in one direction only. Some so-called right-to-left scripts such as the Persian script and Arabic are mostly, but not exclusively, right-to-left—mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. That also happens if text from

1550-400: Is then further subcategorized. In most cases, other properties must be used to adequately describe all the characteristics of any given code point. The 1024 points in the range U+D800 – U+DBFF are known as high-surrogate code points, and code points in the range U+DC00 – U+DFFF ( 1024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point followed by

1612-500: Is to be inserted into a location to make an enclosed weak character inherit its writing direction. For example, to correctly display the U+2122 ™ TRADE MARK SIGN for an English name brand (LTR) in an Arabic (RTL) passage, an LRM mark is inserted after the trademark symbol if the symbol is not followed by LTR text (e.g. " قرأ Misplaced Pages™‎ طوال اليوم. "). If the LRM mark

1674-518: Is true of the other directional formatting characters, "overrides" can be nested one inside another, and in embeddings and isolates. Using unicode U+202D (LTR Override) will switch direction from Left-to-Right to Right-to-Left. Similarly, using U+202E (RTL Override) will switch direction from Right-to-Left to Left-to-Right. Refer to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm . The "pop" directional formatting characters terminate

1736-507: Is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages , and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646 , each being code-for-code identical with one another. However, The Unicode Standard is more than just a repertoire within which characters are assigned. To aid developers and designers,

1798-419: Is without diacritics, it enables one to input texts with a minimum motion of the fingers on the keyboard. For the consonants, the differences to learn are: compared to IAST, all letters with an underdot are typed as the same letter capitalized; guttural and palatal nasals (ṅ, ñ) as the corresponding upper case voiced plosives (G, J); IAST ḷ, ḻ, ḻh are quite rare; the only transliteration that needs to be remembered

1860-448: Is z for ś. The vowels table, the significant difference is for the sonorants and Anusvāra, visarga are capitalized instead of their diacritics. Finally, it is fairly readable with practice. Sanskrit text encoded in the Harvard-Kyoto convention can be unambiguously converted to Devanāgarī, with two exceptions: Harvard-Kyoto does not distinguish अइ ( a followed by i , in separate syllables, i.e. in hiatus) from ऐ (the diphthong ai ) or अउ (

1922-476: The Latin alphabet only. Adding new character sets and character encodings enabled a number of other left-to-right scripts to be supported, but did not easily support right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew , and mixing the two was not practical. Right-to-left scripts were introduced through encodings like ISO/IEC 8859-6 and ISO/IEC 8859-8 , storing the letters (usually) in writing and reading order. It

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1984-578: The 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to Xerox 's Character Code Standard (XCCS). In 1987, Xerox employee Joe Becker , along with Apple employees Lee Collins and Mark Davis , started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. With additional input from Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad , Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode'

2046-567: The ISO's Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) use identical character names and code points. However, the Unicode versions do differ from their ISO equivalents in two significant ways. While the UCS is a simple character map, Unicode specifies the rules, algorithms, and properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. Thus, The Unicode Standard includes more information, covering in-depth topics such as bitwise encoding, collation , and rendering. It also provides

2108-798: The Unicode encoding standard divides all its characters into one of four types: 'strong', 'weak', 'neutral', and 'explicit formatting'. Strong characters are those with a definite direction. Examples of this type of character include most alphabetic characters, syllabic characters, Han ideographs, non-European or non-Arabic digits, and punctuation characters that are specific to only those scripts. Weak characters are those with vague direction. Examples of this type of character include European digits, Eastern Arabic-Indic digits, arithmetic symbols, and currency symbols. Neutral characters have direction indeterminable without context. Examples include paragraph separators, tabs, and most other whitespace characters. Punctuation symbols that are common to many scripts, such as

2170-544: The character will become LTR, in an RTL document, it will become RTL). Unicode bidirectional characters are used in the Trojan Source vulnerability. Visual Studio Code highlights BiDi control characters since version 1.62 released in October 2021. Visual Studio highlights BiDi control characters since version 17.0.3 released on December 14, 2021. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written bidirectionally, where

2232-405: The colon, comma, full-stop, and the no-break-space also fall within this category. Explicit formatting characters, also referred to as "directional formatting characters", are special Unicode sequences that direct the algorithm to modify its default behavior. These characters are subdivided into "marks", "embeddings", "isolates", and "overrides". Their effects continue until the occurrence of either

2294-496: The core specification, published as a print-on-demand paperback, may be purchased. The full text, on the other hand, is published as a free PDF on the Unicode website. A practical reason for this publication method highlights the second significant difference between the UCS and Unicode—the frequency with which updated versions are released and new characters added. The Unicode Standard has regularly released annual expanded versions, occasionally with more than one version released in

2356-471: The correct pronunciation of Russian words but also maintains the Russian orthography, since a single Harvard-Kyoto letter corresponds to each Russian one. There is no need for diacritical signs and potential digraph confusion is prevented. All symbols are available on standard keyboards. The Harvard-Kyoto system doesn't preserve upper-case letters, which is not an issue when only considering pronunciation. But

2418-475: The discretion of the software actually rendering the text, such as a web browser or word processor . However, partially with the intent of encouraging rapid adoption, the simplicity of this original model has become somewhat more elaborate over time, and various pragmatic concessions have been made over the course of the standard's development. The first 256 code points mirror the ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard, with

2480-401: The following versions of The Unicode Standard have been published. Update versions, which do not include any changes to character repertoire, are signified by the third number (e.g., "version 4.0.1") and are omitted in the table below. The Unicode Consortium normally releases a new version of The Unicode Standard once a year. Version 17.0, the next major version,

2542-526: The group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991, and the first volume of The Unicode Standard was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992. In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism

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2604-562: The intent of trivializing the conversion of text already written in Western European scripts. To preserve the distinctions made by different legacy encodings, therefore allowing for conversion between them and Unicode without any loss of information, many characters nearly identical to others , in both appearance and intended function, were given distinct code points. For example, the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block encompasses

2666-403: The last two code points in each of the 17 planes (e.g. 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. Like surrogates, the rule that these cannot be used is often ignored, although the operation of the byte order mark assumes that U+FFFE will never be the first code point in

2728-487: The legacy 'embedding' directional formatting characters, 'isolate' characters have no effect on the ordering of the text outside their scope. Isolates can be nested, and may be placed within embeddings and overrides. The "override" directional formatting characters allow for special cases, such as for part numbers (e.g. to force a part number made of mixed English, digits and Hebrew letters to be written from right to left), and are recommended to be avoided wherever possible. As

2790-705: 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 website. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen and Khitan large script , encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For other scripts, such as Numidian and Rongorongo , no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character repertoire and other details from

2852-675: The modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2 = 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 Unicode. In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of Research Libraries Group , and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems . In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of Microsoft and NeXT 's Rick McGowan had also joined

2914-828: The range U+10000 through U+10FFFF .) The Unicode codespace is divided into 17 planes , numbered 0 to 16. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), and contains the most commonly used characters. All code points in the BMP are accessed as a single code unit in UTF-16 encoding and can be encoded in one, two or three bytes in UTF-8. Code points in planes 1 through 16 (the supplementary planes ) are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16 and encoded in four bytes in UTF-8 . Within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters. The size of

2976-451: The scope of the most recent "embedding", "override", or "isolate". In the algorithm, each sequence of concatenated strong characters is called a "run". A "weak" character that is located between two "strong" characters with the same orientation will inherit their orientation. A "weak" character that is located between two "strong" characters with a different writing direction will inherit the main context's writing direction (in an LTR document

3038-415: The sequence they are intended to be interpreted, as opposed to 'visually', the sequence they appear. This distinction is relevant for bidi support because at any bidi transition, the visual presentation ceases to be the 'logical' one. Thus, in order to offer bidi support, Unicode prescribes an algorithm for how to convert the logical sequence of characters into the correct visual presentation. For this purpose,

3100-457: The signs that had a distinct "head" or "tail" faced the beginning of the line. Chinese characters can be written in either direction as well as vertically (top to bottom then right to left), especially in signs (such as plaques), but the orientation of the individual characters does not change. This can often be seen on tour buses in China, where the company name customarily runs from the front of

3162-464: The standard defines 154 998 characters and 168 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within the standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes 3790 emoji , with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as

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3224-429: The standard also provides charts and reference data, as well as annexes explaining concepts germane to various scripts, providing guidance for their implementation. Topics covered by these annexes include character normalization , character composition and decomposition, collation , and directionality . Unicode text is processed and stored as binary data using one of several encodings , which define how to translate

3286-453: The standard's abstracted codes for characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode Standard itself defines three encodings: UTF-8 , UTF-16 , and UTF-32 , though several others exist. Of these, UTF-8 is the most widely used by a large margin, in part due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII . Unicode was originally designed with the intent of transcending limitations present in all text encodings designed up to that point: each encoding

3348-461: The symbol "^", if desired, may give the hint that next letter is capitalized (^b = Б). As well, an apostrophe sign may be used to introduce a "stress" sign if necessary (za'mok – castle ; zamo'k – lock ). Unicode Unicode , formally The Unicode Standard , is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of

3410-462: The treatment of orthographical variants in Han characters , there is considerable disagreement regarding which differences justify their own encodings, and which are only graphical variants of other characters. At the most abstract level, Unicode assigns a unique number called a code point to each character. Many issues of visual representation—including size, shape, and style—are intended to be up to

3472-530: The two most common forms. Boustrophedon is a writing style found in ancient Greek inscriptions, in Old Sabaic (an Old South Arabian language) and in Hungarian runes . This method of writing alternates direction, and usually reverses the individual characters, on each successive line. Moon type is an embossed adaptation of the Latin alphabet invented as a tactile alphabet for the blind. Initially

3534-418: The two-character prefix U+ always precedes a written code point, and the code points themselves are written as hexadecimal numbers. At least four hexadecimal digits are always written, with leading zeros prepended as needed. For example, the code point U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN is padded with two leading zeros, but U+13254 𓉔 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH O004 ( [REDACTED] )

3596-618: 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 Areas code assignments. There is also a Medieval Unicode Font Initiative focused on special Latin medieval characters. Part of these proposals has been already included in Unicode. The Script Encoding Initiative,

3658-612: The vehicle to its rear — that is, from right to left on the right side of the bus, and from left to right on the left side of the bus. English texts on the right side of the vehicle are also quite commonly written in reverse order. (See pictures of tour bus and post vehicle below.) Likewise, other CJK scripts made up of the same square characters, such as the Japanese writing system and Korean writing system , can also be written in any direction, although horizontally left-to-right, top-to-bottom and vertically top-to-bottom right-to-left are

3720-640: The years several countries or government agencies have been members of the Unicode Consortium. Presently only the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (Oman) is a full member with voting rights. The Consortium 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 currently covers most major writing systems in use today. As of 2024 ,

3782-491: 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, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs , and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used CJK characters—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for

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3844-439: Was relied upon for use in its own context, but with no particular expectation of compatibility with any other. Indeed, any two encodings chosen were often totally unworkable when used together, with text encoded in one interpreted as garbage characters by the other. Most encodings had only been designed to facilitate interoperation between a handful of scripts—often primarily between a given script and Latin characters —not between

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