The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0

✍ Scribed by The Unicode Consortium

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 559
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use. Unicode is changing all that! The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments......Page 2
Current Associate Members......Page 8
1 Introduction 1......Page 11
2 General Structure 11......Page 12
Concepts, Architecture, Conformance, and Guidelines......Page 30
Character Block Descriptions......Page 31
Appendices......Page 32
Character Names......Page 33
Extended BNF......Page 34
Unicode E-mail Discussion List......Page 36
How to Contact the Unicode Consortium......Page 37
Introduction......Page 39
1.1 Coverage......Page 40
1.2 Design Goals......Page 41
1.3 Text Handling......Page 42
1.4 The Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646......Page 43
The Unicode Technical Committee......Page 44
Universality......Page 50
2.3 Compatibility Characters......Page 59
UTF-16......Page 65
UTF-8......Page 66
Comparison of the Advantages of UTF-32, UTF-16, and UTF-8......Page 67
Normalization Forms......Page 96
3.3 Semantics......Page 97
3.5 Properties......Page 100
Combining Classes......Page 117
Hangul Syllable Decomposition......Page 122
4.5 General Category?Normative......Page 130
Ideographic Numeric Values......Page 132
5.1 Transcoding to Other Standards......Page 138
5.4 Handling Surrogate Pairs in UTF-16......Page 142
5.8 Newline Guidelines......Page 147
Requirements for Language Tagging......Page 150
Language Tags and Han Unification......Page 151
5.12 Strategies for Handling Nonspacing Marks......Page 153
Keyboard Input......Page 154
5.13 Rendering Nonspacing Marks......Page 156
Positioning Methods......Page 159
Writing Systems and Punctuation......Page 176
General Punctuation: U+2000?U+206F......Page 183
CJK Symbols and Punctuation: U+3000?U+303F......Page 189
CJK Compatibility Forms: U+FE30?U+FE4F......Page 190
Small Form Variants: U+FE50?U+FE6F......Page 191
Phonetic Extensions: U+1D00?U+1D6A......Page 199
7.2 Greek......Page 202
Cyrillic: U+0400?U+04FF......Page 207
Syriac Cursive Joining......Page 237
South Asian Scripts......Page 243
9.1 Devanagari......Page 245
Bengali: U+0980?U+09FF......Page 258
Gurmukhi: U+0A00?U+0A7F......Page 260
Gujarati: U+0A80?U+0AFF......Page 262
Oriya: U+0B00?U+0B7F......Page 263
Tamil: U+0B80?U+0BFF......Page 265
Telugu: U+0C00?U+0C7F......Page 270
Kannada: U+0C80?U+0CFF......Page 271
Malayalam: U+0D00?U+0D7F......Page 274
Sinhala: U+0D80?U+0DFF......Page 276
Lao: U+0E80?U+0EFF......Page 294
Myanmar: U+1000?U+109F......Page 296
Khmer: U+1780?U+17FF......Page 299
Tagbanwa: U+1760?U+177F......Page 311
11.1 Han......Page 316
Additional Modern Scripts......Page 342
12.5 Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics......Page 352
Old Italic: U+10300?U+1032F......Page 359
Runic: U+16A0?U+16F0......Page 361
13.6 Linear B......Page 365
Cypriot Syllabary: U+10800?U+1083F......Page 366
14.3 Number Forms......Page 377
Superscripts and Subscripts: U+2070?U+209F......Page 378
14.4 Mathematical Symbols......Page 379
Miscellaneous Technical: U+2300?U+23FF......Page 384
Geometric Shapes: U+25A0?U+25FF......Page 387
14.7 Miscellaneous Symbols and Dingbats......Page 389
Dingbats: U+2700?U+27BF......Page 390
Enclosed CJK Letters and Months: U+3200?U+32FF......Page 392
Special Areas and Format Characters......Page 401
15.2 Layout Controls......Page 405
15.3 Invisible Operators......Page 411
Deprecated Format Characters: U+206A?U+206F......Page 412
Surrogates Area: U+D800?U+DFFF......Page 414
15.8 Noncharacters......Page 418
Specials: U+FEFF, U+FFF0?U+FFFD......Page 419
16.1 Character Names List......Page 429
Images in the Code Charts and Character Lists......Page 430
Case Mappings......Page 431
Decompositions......Page 432
16.2 CJK Unified Ideographs......Page 433
16.3 Hangul Syllables......Page 434
Han Radical-Stroke Index......Page 437
Han Unification History......Page 440
UAX #14: Line Breaking Properties......Page 443
UTR #18: Unicode Regular Expression Guidelines......Page 444
Unicode Technical Notes......Page 445
Where Is My Character?......Page 446
C.1 History......Page 448
C.2 Encoding Forms in ISO/IEC 10646......Page 451
UTF-16......Page 452
C.5 Identification of Features for the Unicode Standard......Page 453
Changes from Unicode Version 3.0......Page 456
D.2 Changes from Unicode Version 3.0 to Version 3.1......Page 458
D.3 Changes from Unicode Version 3.1 to Version 3.2......Page 459
D.4 Changes from Unicode Version 3.2 to Version 4.0......Page 460
R.1 Source Standards and Specifications......Page 483
Indices......Page 503
A......Page 546