Intro
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- By Joel Spolsky Wednesday, October 08, 2003
an article of "Joel on Software painless software management"
[quote]
... So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will. ...
[/quote]
That's Joel Spolsky, software developer, New York City (Fog Creek Software http://www.fogcreek.com/ ); he is very serious, and he's right ... - de'ja' vu
- In French de'ja' vu means literally "already seen" ...
NOTE that there (should be) are accents on the e and the a: the e has an acute accent, the a a grave accent.
ONE example that you need a few accents to write correct English because the phrase "deja vu", without accent marks, indicates the sensation one experiences when feeling that something has been experienced before when this is in fact not the case. - ACCENT 2, ACCENT MARK.
- The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993
1993, Kenneth G. Wilson (1923?).
"English sometimes retains accent marks in words borrowed from languages that regularly employ them in writing ..." - Brief History of Character Codes
- A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe, and East Asia by Steven J. Searle, Web Master, TRON Web.
Resources
on the net
- UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ
- All you need to know to use Unicode/UTF-8 on Unix and Linux systems.
- Universal Character Set
- About the international standard ISO/IEC 10646...
- Unicode
- Information for programmers and implementers involved in globalization work.
- Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe, and East Asia
- Steven J. Searle on the evolution of character codes from the telegraph to Unicode.
- Letter Database
- Languages, character sets, names etc. What special characters are needed to write af Afrikaans .. to Yoruba. Offers pictures of the characters
- Zvon Character Search
- For character, entity, decimal, hexadecimal, name, and alias.
Testpages
- UTF-8 Sampler
- Many languages, typical characters,
- Tenth International Unicode Conference - Unicode UTF-8
- "When the world wants to talk, it speaks Unicode"
Contains texts in many languages, advertising the Tenth International Unicode Conference. - UTF-8 Test Page
- Test for UNICODE UTF-8 encoding, Czech and Slovak, Polish, Romanian, Croatian and Slovenian, Hungarian, German characters, Russian alphabet, Special Byelorussian and Ukrainian characters, Special Serbian and Macedonian characters.
- Unicode Support in Your Browser
- "Does Your Browser Support Multi-language ? ... and would you like to see what's in those really BIG fonts? "
James Kass jameskass at worldnet dot att dot net has Unicode reference sheets, also as zip files,
tips for older versions of Netscape and IE 5.0 and Microsoft Outlook Express
special characters to html websheets
download freeware Ol Cemet' font
download Code2000 shareware demo Unicode font
Script Links and Unicode test pages.
Books
Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard
Amazon Price: $44.40 (as of 07/13/2009) 
Unicode: A Primer
Amazon Price: $24.99 (as of 07/13/2009)
The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0
Amazon Price: $74.99 (as of 07/13/2009)
Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode
Amazon Price: (as of 07/13/2009)
by Norbert
Norbert was born in the middle of the last century in Vienna, (Austria, Europe). He got hooked on programming computers even before entering the unive...
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