An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode

This tutorial will provide a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, illustrate the problems involved in implementing such scripts in products, and describe how Unicode deals with these features. It does not provide detailed coding advice but does provide the essential background information needed to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment across a wide range of scripts. It has also proved to be an excellent orientation for newcomers to the conference, providing the background needed to assist understanding of the other talks! The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards and more. The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek. While this tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it has also attracted very good reviews from people at an intermediate and advanced level due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is needed.