Abstract:
Unicode is an international character-encoding standard designed to support the
electronic exchange, processing, storage, and display of the written texts of all of the
world’s languages and scripts, including scientific, mathematical, and technical symbols.
Unicode is an encoding standard, not a software program or a font. The standard is
independent of operating systems, programming languages, database management
systems, and hardware platforms. Before Unicode, there were hundreds of different
encoding schemes; no single one could contain enough characters. The European Union
alone required several for its languages.