The digital landscape introduced people to effective communication and increased accessibility. One of the essential driving forces that made this possible is Unicode. This article will explore what Unicode is and how it helped break down language barriers in the modern world of computing.
What is Unicode?
Unicode is a character encoding standard used to represent texts on computers. This enables computers to display text correctly regardless of platform, device, application, or language people use.
How does Unicode work?
Unicode functions as a translator for your computer to display text correctly, no matter where it originates from. Here’s the breakdown of how Unicode works:
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Number assignment
In the Unicode standard, each character, symbol, or emoji is assigned a unique identifying number called a code point. These code points act as a reference for computers to ensure consistent representation across different devices and software. Code points then need to be translated into a format computers can use for display (e.g., turning them into ones and zeros).
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Numbers to bytes
Since computers store information in bits and bytes, character encoding converts these code points into a series of bytes. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the most common encoding forms, which tell how many bytes are used to represent each code point. UTF-8 is used for common languages like English and only takes up 1 byte per character. Meanwhile, UTF-16 is used for more complex characters that may take 2 or 4 bytes.
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Bytes to characters
The texts you see on the screen undergo a decoding process. The software reads the encoding information, checks the Unicode standard to see which characters match the bytes it’s reading, and then renders the character on the screen.
What are the benefits of Unicode?
As you may have already figured out, Unicode is useful for facilitating multilingual computing. Here are some common benefits of Unicode:
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Global communication
Unicode makes it possible for people to communicate in any language by displaying the intended characters across different devices and platforms. This is useful for businesses and organizations that need to work on texts in different languages in different parts of the world.
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Consistent character rendering
The Unicode system ensures that the characters are displayed accurately on any device, platform, or software that supports it. This reduces the complexities of sharing texts originating in different languages or with special symbols.
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Support for a wide range of languages:
Unicode supports many languages, including living and dead languages and mathematical, musical, and technical symbols, making it a truly universal character encoding standard.
The challenges of Unicode
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Legacy systems
Older systems may not support Unicode, making them unable to display text correctly.
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Font support
Some characters may not display properly because there are fonts that Unicode does not support.
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Complexity
Some may find the Unicode standard difficult to implement due to its sheer breadth of characters.
Conclusion
Unicode is an essential encoding standard used to display text correctly on devices, software, and systems. This universal character encoding system has helped bridge the gap in communication across different languages worldwide, fostering a more inclusive digital landscape for everybody.
