An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode

What's it about?

This material was initially developed for delivery as a regularly-featured tutorial at Internationalization & Unicode Conferences.

The tutorial will provide you with an understanding of key requirements for implementing writing systems in information technology. It will do this by examining real examples of a wide range of modern scripts to discover features that a computerized implementation must support. It will also make special reference, where appropriate, to how the Unicode Standard points the way forward for meeting these requirements.

The tutorial does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues. It will also constitute an excellent orientation for newcomers to the topic, providing a wide-ranging framework that assists in assimilating further, more detailed and specific information.

Naturally, given the tutorial format this is an ambitious approach, and it will mean that we cannot go into great detail on any particular topic. If you would like to understand a topic better, there are a number of excellent resources cited at the end of the tutorial, one of which is the very readable Unicode Standard itself. .

Versions

I suggest you read the PDF file since it is the most up to date. It is currently a single file, 3.9Mb in size.

There is also an HTML version, but it is not as up to date as the PDF file.