Character Sets and Character Encoding: A Brief Introduction

(Via Current Cites) Roy Tennant has identified a very useful article from RLG DigiNews 8(2) (15 April 2004)

Anyone who has worked with computers long enough has run into the character encoding issue. Even if you are able to get a non-English character to display appropriately on your computer, sending the file to someone else is likely to spell disaster for anything beyond the 256 characters identified in the ASCII character set. But thankfully help is near, in the form of Unicode. This excellent overview piece lays the groundwork and explains the issues related to depicting nearly 100,000 separate characters (about 70,000 of which are Chinese) from 55 writing systems. As Bausenbach explains, we are far from character encoding nirvana, but we're on the right track and making progress. Highly recommended for anyone needing a primer or refresher on these issues.

Posted by Tom on May 25, 2004