Book Details:
By: Jukka K. Korpela
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Formats: Print , Ebook , Safari Books Online
Print: June 2006
Ebook: June 2009
Pages: 688
Print ISBN:978-0-596-10121-3 | ISBN 10:0-596-10121-X
Ebook ISBN:978-0-596-10586-0 | ISBN 10:0-596-10586-X
About the Book
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. There are hundreds of different encoding systems for mapping characters to numbers, but Unicode promises a single mapping. Unicode enables a single software product or website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It's no wonder that industry giants like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andMicrosoft have all adopted Unicode.
Containing everything you need to understand Unicode, this comprehensive reference from O'Reilly takes you on a detailed guide through the complex character world. For starters, it explains how to identify and classify characters - whether they're common, uncommon, or exotic. It then shows you how to type them, utilize their properties, and process character data in a robust manner.
The book is broken up into three distinct parts. The first few chapters provide you with a tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. It gives you a firm grasp of the terminology you need to reference various components, including character sets, fonts and encodings, glyphs and character repertoires.
The middle section offers more detailed information about using Unicode and other character codes. It explains the principles and methods of defining character codes, describes some of the widely used codes, and presents code conversion techniques. It also discusses properties of characters, collation and sorting, line breaking rules and Unicode encodings. The final four chapters cover more advanced material, suchas programming to support Unicode.
You simply can't afford to be without the nuggets of valuable information detailed in Unicode Explained.
Table of Contents
Working with Characters
Chapter 1 : Characters as Data
Introduction to Characters and Unicode
What’s in a Character?
Variation of Writing Systems
Glyphs and Fonts
Definitions of Character Repertoires
Numbering Characters
Encoding Characters as Octet Sequences
Working with Encodings
Working with Fonts
Summaries
Chapter 2 : Writing Characters
Method Varieties
Keyboard Variation and Settings
Virtual Keyboards
Program Commands
Character Maps
Replacements on the Fly
Special Techniques
Escape Sequences
Specialized Editors
Exercise
Chapter 3 : Character Sets and Encodings
Good Old ASCII
ISO 8859 Codes
Windows Latin 1 and Other Windows Codes
Other 8-bit Codes
Unicode and UTF-8
Encodings for East Asian Language
Converters and Transcoding
Using Character Codes
A Systematic Look at Unicode
Chapter 4 : The Structure of Unicode
Design Principles
Versions of Unicode
Coding Space
Unicode Terms
Guide to the Unicode Standard
Unicode and Fonts
Criticism of Unicode
Questions and Answers
Chapter 5 : Properties of Characters
Character Classification
An Overview of Properties
Compositions and Decompositions
Normalization
Case Properties
Collation and Sorting
Text Boundaries
Directionality
Line-Breaking Properties
Unicode Conformance Requirements
Effects on Choosing Characters
Chapter 6 : Unicode Encodings
Unicode Encodings in General
UTF-32 and UCS-4
UTF-16 and UCS-2
UTF-8
Byte Order
Conversions Between Unicode Encodings
Other Encodings
Auto-Detecting the Encoding
Choosing an Encoding
Advanced Unicode Topics
Chapter 7 : Characters and Languages
Writing Systems and IT
Character Requirements of Languages
Transliteration and Transcription
Language Metadata
Languages and Fonts
Chapter 8 : Character Usage
Basics of Character Usage
ASCII (Basic Latin)
Latin-1 Supplement (ISO 8859-1)
Other Latin Letters
Other European Alphabetic Scripts
Diacritic Marks
Letterlike Symbols
General Punctuation
Line Structure Control
Mathematical and Technical Symbols
Other Blocks
Chapter 9 : The Character Level and Above
Levels of Text Representation and Processing
Characters and Markup
Media Types for Text
Chapter 10 : Characters in Internet Protocols
Information About Encoding
Characters in MIME
Content Negotiation and Multilingual Sites
Characters in Protocol Headers
Characters in Domain Names and URLs
Chapter 11 : Characters in Programming
Characters in Computer Languages
Character and String Data
The Preparedness Principle
Character Input and Output
Processing Form Data
Identifiers, Patterns, and Regular Expressions
International Components for Unicode (ICU)
Using Locales
Appendix : Tables for Writing Characters
Additional Notes
Colophon
About the Author
Jukka Korpela is a consultant who specializes in character codes, localization, orthography, usability, and accessibility. After graduating from Helsinki University of Technology, he taught these subjects in the university's Computer Science department and worked on localization and accessibility issues at TIEKE before becoming a full-time author and consultant. His previous books on CSS and XHTML were published in Finland by Docendo press.
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