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Character Encoding Concepts In-Depth

This document is adapted from a tutorial created by Peter Edberg that was presented at the 11th International Unicode Conference. The original paper is published in the Proceedings of that conference with a notice indicating joint copyright by Apple Computer, Inc. and the Unicode Consortium.

The document explores some aspects of character encodings, including terms used, such as coded character sets, character encoding schemes, characters, glyphs, and related concepts. It discusses existing character encodings, focusing on important Internet encodings and how these encodings relate to the Unicode standard. The document also discusses special features of various character encodings and the use of character data in programming languages.

Contents:

Terminology
Non-Unicode Character Encodings
Packing Schemes for Multiple Character Sets
Code-Switching Schemes for Multiple Character Sets
Unicode
Character Set Features
Character Data in Programming Languages

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