Fonts & Encodings

Chapter 2. Characters, glyphs, bytes: An introduction to Unicode

In the previous chapter, we saw the long journey that encodings took on their way to covering as many languages and writing systems as possible. In Orwell's year, 1984, an ISO committee was formed with the goal of developing a universal multi-byte encoding. In its first (experimental) version, this encoding, known as ISO 10646 (to show that it was an extension of ISO 646, i.e., ASCII), sought to remain compatible with the ISO 2022 standard and offered room for approximately 644 million characters (!), divided into 94 groups (G0) of 190 planes (G0 + G1) of 190 rows (G0 + G1) of 190 cells (G0 + G1). The ideographic characters were distributed over four planes: traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. When this encoding came up for a vote, it was not adopted.

At the same time, engineers from Apple and Xerox were working on the development of Unicode, starting with an encoding called XCCS that Xerox had developed. The Unicode Consortium was established, and discussions between the ISO 10646 committee and Unicode began. Unicode's fundamental idea was to break free of the methods of ISO 2022, with its mixture of one- and two-byte encodings, by systematically using two bytes throughout. To that end, it was necessary to save space by unifying the ideographic characters.

Instead of becoming fierce competitors, Unicode and ISO 10646 influenced each other, to the point that ISO 10646 systematically aligned ...